1.1. Natural and social in man. (Man as a result of biological and sociocultural evolution.)

1.2. Worldview, its types and forms

1.3. Types of knowledge

1.4. The concept of truth, its criteria

1.5. Thinking and activity

1.6. Needs and Interests

1.7. Freedom and Necessity in Human Action

1.8. The systemic structure of society: elements and subsystems

1.9. Basic institutions of society

1.10. The concept of culture. Forms and varieties of culture

1.11. The science. The main features of scientific thinking. Natural and social sciences

1.12. Education, its importance for the individual and society

1.13. Religion

1.14. Art

1.15. Morality

1.16. The concept of social progress

1.17. Multivariance of social development (types of societies)

1.18. Threats of the 21st century (global problems)

1.1. Natural and social in man.

( Man as a result of biological and sociocultural evolution)

Anthropogenesis - the process of origin and formation of the physical type of a person.

Anthroposociogenesis - the process of formation of the social essence of man.

Human - biosocio-spiritual being , the highest stage of development of organisms on Earth.

In man, two principles, two natures are combined: biological and socio-spiritual. The biological, natural component is manifested in the structure and characteristics of the human body, innate (genetic) inclinations, and abilities. However, one can become a full-fledged person only in society, interacting with other people and social institutions. Consciousness, thinking, skills and knowledge are formed only in society.

Biological differences between humans and animals:

upright position, upright posture;

developed articulatory apparatus (speech organs);

lack of dense hairline;

a large volume of the brain (in relation to the body);

developed hand, capable of fine motor skills.

Socio-spiritual differences between humans and animals:

thinking and articulate speech;

conscious creative activity;

creating a culture;

the creation of tools;

spiritual life.

Individual - a person as a representative of society and the human race (first of all, the biological component).

Individuality - specific, unique, inimitable properties and qualities inherent only to this person (both innate and acquired in society).

Personality - the highest stage of human development, at which he acts as a subject of conscious activity and as a carrier of socially significant properties and qualities.

Socially significant personality traits include:

active life position;

own opinion and the ability to defend it;

developed communication skills;

responsibility;

availability of education, etc.

Personality structure:

social status - the position of a person in the social hierarchy;

social role - a pattern of behavior expected by society from a person with a certain status;

orientation - the certainty of human behavior by higher values, attitudes, the meaning of life, worldview.

A person is not a person from the moment of birth, but becomes one in the process of socialization.

The most important social characteristic of a person is the presence of consciousness in him.

There are several basic understandings of the term consciousness:

the totality of all human knowledge;

focus on a specific object;

self-consciousness, self-report - the mind's observation of its own activities;

a collection of individual and collective ideas.

Since ideas characteristic of the whole society play an important role in individual consciousness, they speak of social consciousness.

public consciousness - consciousness inherent in large groups of people, having a number of similar ideas, principles, attitudes, habits, customs, traditions for most of these people.

Public consciousness is formed, firstly, due to the convergence of interests and activities of large groups of people; secondly, due to the wide dissemination of ideas that are present in the public mind through education, the media, and the activities of parties.

Public consciousness is formed under the influence social activities and largely corresponds to it. However, in some cases, the development of social consciousness may lag behind the development of social life (remnants of consciousness); and in other cases - to get ahead (advanced consciousness).

Forms of social consciousness are passed down from generation to generation and actively influence the life of society.

The structure of public consciousness:

philosophy;

political consciousness;

legal consciousness;

• aesthetic consciousness;

Correlation between individual and social consciousness .

There are no rigid boundaries between individual and public consciousness, they constantly interact.

Individual consciousness, on the one hand, is formed under the influence of social consciousness, and on the other hand, it selects the content of social consciousness that is most acceptable to itself.

Social consciousness, on the one hand, exists through individual consciousness, and on the other hand, it adopts only individual elements, the achievements of individual consciousness.

Particularly distinguish mass consciousness - a set of ideas, moods, ideas that reflect certain aspects of social life. Public opinion is a state of mass consciousness, reflecting the attitude towards certain social facts.

In addition to consciousness, there is a layer of phenomena and processes that are not realized by a person, but affect his behavior. In social science, this is called the unconscious (in psychology, the subconscious).

The manifestation of the sphere of the unconscious include:

dreams,

fantasy,

creative insight,

• reservations,

  affects,

  forgetting, etc.

Differences between the unconscious and consciousness:

merging the subject with the object;

lack of spatial and temporal landmarks;

lack of a cause-and-effect relationship mechanism.

self-awareness - a person's definition of himself as a person capable of making independent decisions and being responsible for them.

self-knowledge - a person's comprehension of his individuality in all its diversity (also the study of society itself).

Reflection - reflections of a person about what is happening in his mind.

Self-realization - the most complete identification and implementation by the individual of his goals and ideals, the desire for creative realization.

Self-awareness and self-realization are the basis of social behavior.

social behavior - purposeful activity in relation to other people.

social behavior becomes possible under the condition of successful socialization of the individual.

Socialization - a lifelong process of human interaction with society and its institutions, as a result of which he assimilates social norms, masters social roles, and acquires the skills of joint activity.

Socialization of the individual takes place in two stages:

1. Primary socialization - unconscious by the person himself and uncritically perceived impact of society, its norms and institutions, leading to the primary assimilation of the norms and skills of social interaction. Primary socialization ends with the formation of personality.

2. Secondary socialization - critical and selective mastering of new norms and patterns of behavior by the individual within the framework of social institutions.

Socialization in society occurs with the help of socialization institutions.

Institutes of socialization - social institutions responsible for the socialization of the individual in society. As such, they distinguish:

Socialization agents - people who carry out socialization within certain institutions (father, commander (chief), journalist).

• Can a person live outside society?
• Is society simply the sum of living people?
• Does the fate of a person depend on the fate of society?
• Can a person influence the life of society?

What is a society? From the first topic of this course, we learned that the emergence of man and the emergence of society are a single process. There is no person - there is no society. If there is no society, there is no individual. It can be objected: Robinson Crusoe, once on a desert island, found himself out of society, but he was a man.

However, those who think in this way forget that Robinson could survive only because he had the knowledge, experience various kinds activities, in addition, he found some items from the lost ship. And knowledge, and labor skills, and objects - all these are products of society. Let us remember that not a single child who grew up among animals ever became a man. He did not have knowledge, labor skills, he did not know how to use objects created in human society.

What do we call society?

IN Everyday life society is sometimes called a group of people who are part of someone's social circle; Societies are also called some voluntary associations of people for some kind of activity (book lovers society, Red Cross society, etc.).

In science, a part of the world is called society. It includes not only all living people. Society is understood as continuously developing. This means that it has not only a present, but also a past and a future. Generations of people who lived in the distant and very recent past did not leave without a trace. They created cities and villages, technology, various institutions. From them, people living now received language, science, art, and practical skills. If it were not so, then each generation would have to start with the invention of the stone axe.

So, society is all of humanity in its history, modernity and perspective. The unification of people in society does not depend on someone's desire. Entry into human society does not occur by application: every born person is naturally included in the life of society.

Scientists in antiquity understood society as a collection of individuals. In fact, the structure of society is complex. It includes large and small groups of people. First of all, these are primary groups. The born person is in the family team. Then he enters the educational, labor and other official teams, as well as informal, informal (for example, friendly companies).

If society is presented as an integral organism, then the primary collective is a cell of the organism. There are also large groups of people who differ in a number of common features. You know that in ancient societies there were slaves, slave owners, peasants, artisans, nationalities were formed, and under capitalism, nations.

Between various groups of people, primary collectives, there are various connections and relationships. Each person belongs to one or another social group, belongs to one or another nation, is a member of several collectives. And he inevitably enters into existing social relations. These relationships are a characteristic feature of society. In the course of development, social relations change, and the face of society also changes. Do you know that society Ancient Greece And Ancient Rome different from the primitive communal, and capitalism is different from feudalism. These changes in society were associated with the emergence new technology and new ways of economic activity, with other than before, the relations of people in the process of production, with changes in the attitudes of various social groups to state power, in their minds.

The main areas of society. Society can be divided into four areas or spheres. The words "region" and "sphere" are not used here in the natural-scientific or mathematical sense. These words make it possible to single out its parts in the whole society, each of which includes elements and relations united according to their place and role in the life of society.

Economic sphere is in many respects defining in relation to other spheres. It includes industrial and agricultural production, the relationship of people in the production process, the exchange of products of industrial activity, their distribution.

Social sphere includes layers and classes, class relations, nations and national relations, family, family and domestic relations, educational institutions, medical care, leisure.

Political sphere The life of society includes politics, the state, law, the relationship between them, the relationship of people about power.

spiritual realm covers science, morality, religion, art, scientific institutions, religious organizations, cultural institutions, the corresponding activities of people.

All four spheres interact with each other.

Within society, at each stage of development, all its elements (production, technology, science, language, large groups of people, primary teams), all relations between people (production, intergroup, interethnic, family, domestic, political, spiritual), all four spheres are interconnected and make up a single whole, i.e., a specific society that has a certain look.

Social norms are aimed at preserving the integrity of society and regulating various relations between people, i.e., rules of conduct that have evolved in accordance with the needs of society. These norms may take the form of permission, that is, permission to behave in a certain way; instructions, i.e. instructions for the required actions; prohibition, i.e., indications of actions that should not be performed. In other words, social norms show which actions society approves and which does not approve. Customs are among the oldest social norms. You know well the customs of celebrating Christmas and New Year. The customs of hospitality, respect for elders, etc. are also widespread. Huge masses of people follow these norms.

The most significant are the moral and legal norms that you will encounter in the next part of this tutorial. Here we note that society, through social norms, gives each person patterns of behavior. For each person, social norms serve as a measure of his behavior, which he is guided by. And for society, norms are a criterion for evaluating this behavior. Violation of any social norms in society is condemned, and violation of some of them can lead to severe sanctions: imprisonment and other punishments.

Stages of development of society. Society has come a long way, on which science distinguishes several steps. If we consider first of all the means by which people produce the material goods they need, as well as the experience gained in such production, then we can see three stages in the development of society: agrarian, industrial and post-industrial society. The first stage - an agrarian society - is characterized by the dominance of subsistence agriculture, the class hierarchy, the decisive role in the life of society belongs to the guardians of the cult - the priests or the church and the army.

Remember the societies ancient world and then medieval. Cities, crafts, trade, money, writing appear in these societies. But the family remains the main production unit, communal principles, traditions and customs prevail. The bulk of the population lives in villages. In this society, exploitation of man by man appears.

At the next stage - industrial society - there are significant changes. Industry plays a decisive role here. As an example of an industrial society, one usually considers the changes that have taken place in Western countries as a result of the industrial revolution of the 18th century. and subsequent economic growth. Scientists indicate such differences between an industrial society and an agrarian one: the predominance of not agricultural, but industrial production; decisive role in social life not small and large landowners, but industrialists, businessmen; the main value is not power, but money; the center of social organization is not the church and the army, but the corporations. This society is based on the development of large-scale machine production, it is characterized by the division of labor, increasing volumes of products, consumption of knowledge. The whole way of life of society is changing: agriculture, transport, communications, professional skills, education, human culture. The proportion of the population employed in agriculture is declining, while the urban population is growing.

It is believed that modern Russia is also an industrial society. The most developed countries of the world (USA, Japan, etc.), according to many scientists, are moving to the third stage of development - they are entering a post-industrial society. Such a society, unlike an industrial one, does not consider nature as a "stock of raw materials" from which one can endlessly take, supporting an expanding economy; the production of a post-industrial society is focused not on volumes, but on the quality of products, on the consumer. Of particular importance here is not the amount of labor expended, but its quality and, consequently, the qualifications, creativity, personal qualities of people employed in production. Experts consider scientific and technological progress to be the main factor of production in such a society. information Technology. In a post-industrial society, the production of scientific knowledge, Scientific research and developments based on university (comprehensive) education. In the economy, the service sector begins to prevail over the production of goods. The role of the state in controlling technological and socio-economic changes is growing.

From the history course, you know that with changes in society, people's lives have changed. And at every stage of history there were societies that differed in their structure and living conditions of people. Thus, the position of a citizen in a republic differs from that of a subject in an absolute monarchy.

And in the same society, the position of a person depends on his belonging to a particular social group, class, estate (give examples from history).

So, let's think: should a person adapt to the social conditions that surround him? Or should people transform these conditions, making them more comfortable for their lives?

Basic concepts

• Society, the main spheres of society, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial society, social norms.

Terms

• Public relations.

Questions for self-examination

1. What is the meaning of the scientific concept "society"?
2. What are social relations?
3. What areas of human activity does society include?
4. How do social norms differ from each other in the form of permission, prescription and prohibition?
5. What role do social norms play in human life and society?
6. How did the life of people change during the transition from one stage of development of society to another?

Tasks

1. Prove that the emergence of man and the emergence of society are processes that are inextricably linked with each other.
2. Express your opinion on the statement: "It is impossible to live in society and be free from society." Think about whether a person can become free if he lives outside of society.
3. The English writer R. Owen wrote: “When a person is born, there is neither positive evil nor positive good, but only the possibility and ability for both, developed in him depending on the environment in which he lives and upbringing, which he receives in the family and society.

   Explain why, in the same society, a person's abilities can be more or less developed.

1. General concept of a person

One ancient sage said: for a person there is no more interesting object than the person himself. D. Diderot considered man to be the highest value, the only creator of all the achievements of culture on earth, the rational center of the universe, the point from which everything should come and to which everything should return.

What is a person? At first glance, this question seems ridiculously simple: indeed. who does not know what a person is. But that's the whole point, that what is closest to us. the most familiar, turns out to be the most difficult as soon as we try to look into the depths of its essence. And here it turns out that the mystery of this phenomenon becomes the greater, the more we try to penetrate into it. However, the bottomlessness of this problem does not scare away, but attracts like a magnet.

Whatever sciences are engaged in the study of man, their methods are always aimed at "dissecting" him. Philosophy, on the other hand, has always strived to comprehend its integrity, knowing full well that a simple sum of knowledge of individual spiders about a person will not give the desired image, and therefore it has always tried to develop its own means of knowing the essence of a person and using them to reveal his place and significance in the world, his attitude to the world, its ability to “make” itself, that is, to become the creator of its own destiny; The philosophical program can be briefly and concisely repeated after Socrates: “Know thyself”, this is the root and core of all other philosophical problems.

The history of philosophy is full of various conceptions of the essence of man. In ancient philosophical thought, it was considered mainly as a part of the cosmos, as a kind of microcosm, and in its human manifestations it was subordinate to a higher principle - fate. In the system of the Christian worldview, a person began to be perceived as a being in which two hypostases are initially inextricably and contradictoryly connected: the spirit and the body. qualitatively opposed to each other as sublime and base. Therefore, Augustine, for example, represented the soul as independent of the body and identified it with man, while Thomas Aquinas considered man as a unity of body and soul, as an intermediate being between animals and angels. Human flesh, from the point of view of Christianity, is an arena of base passions and desires, a product of the devil. Hence the constant desire of man for liberation from the devil's fetters, the desire to comprehend the divine light of truth. This circumstance determines the specificity of the human relationship to the world: there is clearly a desire not only to know one's own essence, but to join the highest essence - God, and thereby gain salvation on the day of judgment. The thought of the finiteness of human existence is alien to this consciousness: belief in the immortality of the soul often brightened up the harsh earthly existence.

The philosophy of modern times, being predominantly idealistic, saw in man (following Christianity) primarily his spiritual essence. We still draw from the best creations of this period diamond placers of the finest observations on the inner life of the human spirit, on the meaning and form of the operations of the human mind, on the secret, hidden in the depths of the personal springs of the human psyche and activity. Natural science, having freed itself from the ideological dictates of Christianity, was able to create unsurpassed examples of naturalistic studies of human nature. But an even greater merit of this time was the unconditional recognition of the autonomy of the human mind in the matter of knowing its own essence.

Idealistic philosophy of the 19th - early 20th centuries. hypertrophied the spiritual principle in a person, reducing in some cases his essence to rational start, in others, on the contrary, - to the irrational. Although the understanding of the real essence of a person has often already been seen in various theories, it was more or less adequately formulated by certain philosophers, for example, Hegel, who considered the individual in the context of the socio-historical whole as a product of active interaction in which the objectification of human essence and the entire objective world around man is nothing but the result of this objectification, yet there has not yet been a holistic doctrine of man. This process as a whole resembled the state of a volcano, ready to erupt, but still slow, waiting for the last, decisive shocks. internal energy. Beginning with Marxism, a person becomes the center of philosophical knowledge, from which threads come that connect him through society with the entire vast universe. The basic principles of the dialectical-materialistic concept of man were laid, but the construction of a building of a whole philosophy of man that is harmonious in all respects is, in principle, an unfinished process in human self-knowledge, because the manifestations of human essence are extremely diverse - this is mind, and will, and character, and emotions, work and communication. . . A person thinks, rejoices, suffers, loves and hates, constantly strives for something, achieves what he wants and, not being satisfied with it, rushes to new goals and ideals.

The determining condition for the formation of man is labor, the emergence of which marked the transformation of an animal ancestor into a man. In labor, a person constantly changes the conditions of his existence, transforming them in accordance with his constantly developing needs, creates a world of material and spiritual culture, which is created by a person to the same extent that a person himself is shaped by culture. Labor is impossible in a single manifestation and from the very beginning acts as a collective, social one. The development of labor activity globally changed the natural essence of the human ancestor. Socially, labor entailed the formation of new, social qualities of a person, such as: language, thinking, communication, beliefs, value orientations, worldview, etc. Psychologically, it resulted in the transformation of instincts in two ways: in terms of their suppression , inhibition (submission to the control of the mind) and in terms of their transformation into a new qualitative state of purely human cognitive activity - intuition.

All this meant the emergence of a new biological species Homosapiens, which from the very beginning acted in two interrelated guises - as a rational person and as a public person. (If you think deeply, it is, in essence, one and the same thing.) Emphasizing the universality of the social principle in man, K. Marx wrote: “. . . the essence of man is not an abstract inherent in a single individual, in its reality it is the totality of all social relations. Such an understanding of man was already prepared in German classical philosophy. J. G. Fichte believed, for example, that the concept of man does not refer to a single person, because such a person cannot be conceived, but only to the genus. L. Feuerbach, who created the materialistic concept of philosophical anthropology, which served as the starting point for Marx's reasoning about man, his essence, also wrote that an isolated person does not exist. The concept of man necessarily presupposes another man, or, more precisely, other men, and it is only in this respect that man is a man in full sense this word.

Everything that a person possesses, how he differs from animals, is the result of his life in society. And this applies not only to the experience that the individual acquires during his life. A child is born already with all the anatomical and physiological wealth accumulated by mankind over the past millennia. At the same time, it is characteristic that a child who has not absorbed the culture of society turns out to be the most unadapted to life of all living beings. Outside of society, one cannot become a person. There are cases when, due to unfortunate circumstances, very young children fell into the hands of animals. And what? They did not master either an upright gait or articulate speech, and the sounds they uttered imitated the sounds of those animals among which they lived. Their thinking turned out to be so primitive that one can speak of it only with a certain degree of conventionality. This is a vivid example of the fact that a person in the proper sense of the word is, as it were, a constantly acting receiver and transmitter of social information, understood in the broadest sense of the word as a way of activity. “The individual,” wrote K. Marx, “is a social being. Therefore, any manifestation of his life - even if it does not appear in the immediate form of a collective, performed jointly with others, manifestation of life. - is a manifestation and affirmation of social life "". The essence of a person is not abstract, as one might think, but concrete-historical, that is, its content, remaining in principle the same social, changes depending on the specific content of a particular era, formation , socio-cultural and cultural context, etc. However, at the first stage of considering a personality, its individual moments must fade into the background, but the main issue remains to clarify its universal properties, with the help of which it would be possible to define the concept of a human personality as such The starting point of such an understanding is the interpretation of a person as a subject and product of labor activity, on the basis of which social relations are formed and developed.

Without pretending to the status of a definition, let us briefly summarize its (human) essential features. Then we can say that a person is a rational being, a subject of labor, social relations and communication. At the same time, the emphasis in a person on his social nature does not have in Marxism that simplified meaning that it is only the social environment that forms the human personality. The social here is understood as an alternative to the idealistic-subjectivist approach to a person, which absolutizes his individual psychological features. Such a concept of sociality, being, on the one hand, an alternative to individualistic interpretations, on the other hand, does not deny the biological component in the human personality, which also has a universal character.

This or that hypertrophy of individual components in the structure of the human personality (in fact, in the understanding of man in general as such) takes place in some modern foreign philosophical concepts of man, in particular in Freudianism and existentialism. The understanding of man in existentialism is briefly considered in Ch. II. The essence of the Freudian interpretation of man is as follows.

3. Freud created his own scheme of the structure of the psyche (personality), dividing it into three main layers. The lowest layer and the most powerful, the so-called "It", is beyond consciousness. Past experience, various kinds of biological impulsive drives and passions, unconscious emotions are stored there. On this massive foundation of the unconscious a comparatively small ethane is erected; conscious - that with which a person actually deals and with which he constantly operates. This is his "I". And finally, the third and last floor of the human spirit is the “super-I”, something that is above the “I”, developed by the history of mankind and existing in the system of science, morality, art, culture. These are the ideals of society, social norms, a system of all kinds of prohibitions and rules, in other words, everything that a person learns and with which he is forced to reckon. The main guardian of the "I" is the moral sphere of the personality - "super-I". In response to sinful unconscious urges, it torments the “I” with reproaches, with a sense of guilt.

In itself, Freud's scheme of the structure of the psyche is not without meaning, although its general interpretation and characterization of the relationship between its constituent spheres are scientifically untenable. This hierarchy of elements of the spiritual structure of the personality is based on the idea of ​​the primacy and the controlling role of the unconscious. It is from the “It” that everything that is called mental originates. It is this sphere, subject to the principle of pleasure, that has a decisive influence on human behavior, determining his thoughts and feelings, and through them his actions. Man, according to Freud, is a machine driven by a relatively constant complex of sexual energy (libido), a soul-maddening eros that constantly pierces a person with its arrows. The libido is subject to painful tensions and discharges. Freud called the dynamic mechanism leading from tension to release, from pain to pleasure, the pleasure principle.

Freud's mistake is not in posing problems, but in the way they are solved. The provisions of Freudianism are in clear contradiction with the data of science. Man is, first of all, a conscious being: not only his thinking, but also his emotions are permeated with consciousness. Of course, at the moment when he rushes to help another, saves a drowning man, pulls a child out of the fire, risking own life, a person does not think about the significance of his act, does not calculate, does not generalize, does not reflect - he acts instantly, under the influence of emotions. But these emotions themselves were historically formed on the basis of collectivist skills, reasonable aspirations, and mutual labor assistance. Beneath the emotional outburst, seemingly unaccountable, lie deep layers of "filmed" conscious life.

2. Man as a biopsychosocial being

We approach a person with three different dimensions of his existence: biological, mental and social. "The biological is expressed in morphophysiological, genetic phenomena, as well as in neuro-cerebral, electrochemical and some other processes of the human body. "The mental is understood as the inner spiritual world of a person - his conscious and unconscious processes, will, experiences, memory, character, temperament etc. But not a single aspect reveals to us the phenomenon of man in its entirety. Man, we say, is a rational being. What, then, is his thinking: does it obey only biological laws or only social ones? Any categorical answer would be a clear simplification: human thinking is a complexly organized biopsychosocial phenomenon, the material substrate of which, of course, lends itself to biological measurement (more precisely, physiological), but its content, its specific fullness, is already an unconditional intertwining of the mental and social, and such, in which the social, mediated by the emotional-intellectual-volitional sphere, acts as a mental one.

The social and biological, existing in inseparable unity in man, fix in abstraction only the extreme poles in the diversity of human properties and actions. So, if we go to the biological pole in the analysis of a person, we will “descend” to the level of existence of his organismal (biophysical, physiological) patterns, focused on self-regulation of material-energy processes as a stable dynamic system striving to preserve its integrity. In this aspect, a person acts as a carrier of the biological form of the movement of matter. But after all, he is not just an organism, not just a biological species, but, first of all, a subject of social relations. If, therefore, we go in the analysis of a person to his social essence, starting from his morphological and physiological level and further to his psychophysiological and spiritual structure, then we will thereby move into the area of ​​socio-psychological manifestations of a person as a person. The body and personality are two inseparable aspects of a person. By his organismic level, he is included in the natural connection of phenomena and is subject to natural necessity, and by his personal level he is turned to social being, to society, to the history of mankind, to culture.

“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Therefore, the first concrete fact to be ascertained is the bodily organization of these individuals and their relation to the rest of nature conditioned by it. "" When we consider the social nature of man or speak of man as a person, we are abstracted not from the biological component in general, but only from its anthropological features, from the study of its bodily organization and some elementary mental processes and properties (for example, the simplest instincts) in their purely natural-science specificity. We are distracted, for example, from the natural scientific meaning chemical reactions occurring in a functioning living organism is the task of special sciences. When considering a person's personality, they mean such properties that can be described in social or socio-psychological terms, where the psychological is taken in its social conditionality and fullness. And the bodily organization of a person, considered no longer from an abstract scientific point of view, but as a material substratum of the personality, of course, cannot but influence the psychological characteristics of a person. The bodily organization of a person, his biology is therefore already considered as a special kind of material reality, which has a close connection with the social concept of a person's personality.

The transition from "corporality" as an object natural sciences to "corporality" as a substratum of the socio-psychological properties of a person is carried out only at the personal level of his study. The measurement of a person from two sides - biological and social - in philosophy is related precisely to his personality. The biological side of a person is determined mainly by the hereditary (genetic) mechanism. The social side of the human personality is determined by the process of a person entering the cultural and historical context of society. Neither one nor the other separately, but only their functioning unity can bring us closer to understanding the mystery of man. This, of course, does not exclude the possibility that, for various cognitive and practical purposes, the emphasis on the biological or socio-psychological in man may shift somewhat in one direction or another. But in the final comprehension, the combination of these aspects of a person must certainly be realized. It is possible and necessary to investigate, for example, how the natural, biological essence of a socially developed person manifests itself or, on the contrary, the socio-psychological essence of the natural principle in a person, but the very concept of a person, his personality, and in both studies should be based on the concept of unity social, biological and mental. Otherwise, consideration will leave the realm of the human sphere itself and will join either natural-science and biological research, which has its own private scientific goal, or cultural studies, which is abstracted from the directly acting person.

How does a person unite his biological and social principles? To answer this question, let us turn to the history of the emergence of man as a biological species.

Man appeared on Earth as a result of a long evolution, which led to a change in the actual animal morphology, the appearance of bipedalism, the release of the upper limbs and the development of the articulatory-speech apparatus associated with this, which together led to the development of the brain. It can be said that its morphology was, as it were, a material crystallization of its social, more precisely, collective existence. Thus, at a certain level, anthropogenesis, driven by successful mutations, labor activity, communication and emerging spirituality, seemed to “shift the arrows” from biological development to the rails of the historical formation of social systems proper, as a result of which man was formed as a biosocial unity. Man is born as a biosocial unity. This means that he is born with incompletely formed anatomical and physiological systems, which are completed in the conditions of society, that is, they are genetically laid down just like human ones. The mechanism of heredity, which determines the biological side of a person, includes his social essence. A newborn is not a "tabula of times" on which the environment "draws" its bizarre patterns of the spirit. Heredity supplies the child not only with purely biological properties and instincts. He initially turns out to be the owner of a special ability to imitate adults - their actions, sounds, etc. Curiosity is inherent in him, and this is already a social quality. He is able to be upset, experience fear and joy, his smile is innate. A smile is a human privilege. Thus, the child is born precisely as a human being. And yet at the moment of birth he is only a candidate for man. He cannot become one in isolation: he must learn to become a man. He is introduced into the world of people by society, it is this society that regulates and fills his behavior with social content.

Each person has fingers obedient to his will, he can take a brush, paints and start drawing. But this is not what makes him a real painter. It is the same with consciousness, which is not our natural property. Conscious mental phenomena are formed in vivo as a result of upbringing, training, active mastery of the language, the world of culture. Thus, public beginning penetrates through the mental into the biology of the individual, which in such a transformed form acts as the basis (or material substrate) of his mental, conscious life. »

3. Man and his environment: from Earth to space

Man, like any other living being, has its own habitat, which is refracted in a peculiar way in it in the interaction of all its components. Recently, in the human sciences, the fact of the influence of the environment on the state of the body, the psyche, determining the feeling of its comfort or discomfort, is becoming more and more recognized. Philosophical understanding of man, therefore, would be essentially incomplete without considering him in the "man-environment" system. It is absolutely clear that the "environment" in this case includes primarily the social environment, that is, society, but is not limited to it, but is actually wider. Because of this, it is also heterogeneous; since we will talk about the social environment below, we will concentrate here on the so-called natural environment.

Our life, more than we think, depends on the phenomena of nature. We live on a planet, in the depths of which many still unknown, but affecting us processes are constantly seething, and it itself, like a kind of grain of sand, rushes in its circular motions in the cosmic abyss. The dependence of the state of the human body on natural processes - on various temperature drops, on fluctuations in geomagnetic fields, solar radiation, etc. - is most often expressed in its neuropsychic state and in general in the state of the body.

Different places of the earth are more or less favorable for man. For example, exposure to underground radiation beneficial to the body can help to release from nervous stress or alleviate certain ailments of the body. Most of the natural influences on the human body are still unknown, science has recognized only a negligible part of them. So, it is known that if a person is placed in a non-magnetic environment, he will immediately die.

Man exists in the system of interaction of all the forces of nature and experiences a variety of influences from it. Mental balance is possible only under the condition of physiological and psychological adaptation of a person to the natural world, and since a person is primarily a social being, he can adapt to nature only through society. The social organism operates within the framework of nature, and forgetfulness of this severely punishes man. If the value orientations of society are not aimed at harmony with nature, but, on the contrary, isolate it from it, preaching an ugly overgrown urbanism, then a person who has adopted this value orientation becomes sooner or later a victim of his own value orientation. In addition, a kind of environmental vacuum is formed in him, as if a lack of a sphere of activity, and no social conditions can compensate a person for the psychological losses associated with the “alienation” of nature. Being not only social being but also as a biological being, man, just as he would perish without the society of people, will perish without communion with nature. And social and natural forces act mercilessly in this sense.

The concept of the environment is not limited only to the sphere of the Earth, but includes the cosmos as a whole. The Earth is not a cosmic body isolated from the Universe. In modern science, it is considered firmly established that life on Earth arose under the influence of cosmic processes. Therefore, it is quite natural that every living organism somehow interacts with the cosmos. Now science has established that solar storms and the electromagnetic disturbances associated with them affect the cells, the nervous and vascular systems of the body, the well-being of a person, his psyche. We live in unison with the entire cosmic environment, and any change in it affects our state.

The problem of "inscription" of living organisms in the context of energy-informational interactions occurring in the Universe is currently being intensively developed. There is an assumption that not only the emergence of life on Earth, but also the every second functioning of living systems cannot be separated from their constant interaction with various kinds of radiation (known and not yet known, but quite acceptable) coming from space.

We have been brought up on a rather limited view of life as the result of the play of the elemental forces of earthly sojourn. But this is far from true. And that this is not so was already intuitively understood by the thinkers of the distant past, who considered man in the context of the entire universe as a microcosm within the macrocosm. This "inscription" of man and all living things in the context of the universe, his dependence on all the events taking place in him has always been expressed in mythology, and in religion, and in astrology, and in philosophy, and in scientific views, and in general in all human wisdom. It is possible that life is much more dependent on the influences of the forces of the cosmos than we think. And the dynamics of these forces makes all the cells of a living organism, without exception, and not just the heart, beat in unison with the "cosmic heart" in infinite harmony with celestial bodies and processes, and, of course, first of all with those that are closest to us - with planets and the Sun, Rhythms of the cosmos have a huge impact on the dynamics of changes in the biofields of plants, animals and humans. Our time is characterized by increased attention not only to space problems. but also to the same extent to the microcosm. An amazing rhythmic uniformity is revealed, suggesting the universality of rhythmic structures. Apparently, there is a relatively synchronous “pulse beating” in the macro- and microworld, including in the energy systems of the human body.

In this regard, the ideas of K. E. Tsiolkovsky, V. I. Vernadsky and A. L. Chizhevsky seem to us relevant and far-sighted. Their ideas. finding gradual recognition in modern science, were that. that we are surrounded on all sides by streams of cosmic energy that come to us across vast distances from the stars, planets and the Sun. According to Chizhevsky, solar energy is not the only creator of the sphere of life on Earth in all its lower and higher levels of structural organization and functioning. The energy of cosmic bodies immensely distant from us and their associations had great importance in the origin and evolution of life on our planet. All space bodies, their systems and all the processes taking place in the boundless expanses of the universe, one way or another, constantly affect all living and inorganic things on Earth, including humans. Vernadsky introduced the term "noosphere", denoting the sphere of life and intelligence on our planet. The noosphere is the natural environment of a person, which has a shaping effect on him. The combination in this concept of two moments - biological (living) and social (reasonable) - is the basis for an expanded understanding of the term "environment". There is no reason to consider the noosphere as a purely terrestrial phenomenon; it can also have a general cosmic distribution. Life and mind, apparently, exist in other worlds, so that a person, as a particle of the noosphere, is a social, planetary, and cosmic being.

As soon as the environment has a decisive influence on a person, this concept itself must be subjected to careful analysis, not losing sight of either its cosmic, or its natural, or its social components.

4. Man as a person

Man as a generic being is concretized in real individuals. The concept of an individual points, firstly, to a separate individual as a representative of the highest biological species Homosapiens and, secondly. into a single, separate "atom" of the social community. This concept describes a person in the aspect of his separateness and isolation. An individual as a special single integrity is characterized by a number of properties: the integrity of the morphological and psychophysiological organization, stability in interaction with the environment, and activity. The concept of an individual is only the first condition for designating the subject area of ​​human research, containing the possibility of further concretization with an indication of its qualitative specificity in terms of personality and individuality.

Currently, there are two main concepts of personality: personality as a functional (role) characteristic of a person and personality as its essential characteristic.

The first concept is based on the concept of a person's social function, or rather, on the concept of a social role. For all the significance of this aspect of understanding the personality (it is of great importance in modern applied sociology), it does not allow us to reveal the inner, deep world of a person, fixing only his external behavior, which in this case does not always and necessarily express the real essence of a person.

A deeper interpretation of the concept of personality reveals the latter not in a functional, but in an essential sense: here it is - a clot of its regulatory and spiritual potentialities. the center of self-consciousness, the source of will and the core of character, the subject of free action and supreme power in the inner life of man. Personality is an individual focus and expression of social relations and functions of people, the subject of knowledge and transformation of the world, rights and obligations, ethical, aesthetic and all other social norms. The personal qualities of a person in this case are a derivative of his social image life and self-conscious mind. Personality, therefore, is always a socially developed person.

Personality is formed in the process of activity, communication. In other words, its formation is essentially the process of socialization of the individual. This process occurs through the internal formation of its inimitable and unique appearance. The process of socialization requires productive activity from the individual. expressed in the constant adjustment of their actions, behavior, deeds. This. in turn, it causes the need to develop the ability of self-esteem, which is associated with the development of self-awareness. In this process, the mechanism of reflection peculiar to the personality is worked out. Self-awareness and self-esteem together form the main core of the personality, around which there is a “pattern” of the personality, unique in richness and variety of the finest shades, inherent only in its specificity.

Personality is a combination of its three main components: biogenetic inclinations, the impact of social factors (environment, conditions, norms, regulations) and its psychosocial core - "I". It represents, as it were, an internal social personality, which has become a phenomenon of the psyche, determining its character, the sphere of motivation, manifested in a certain direction, the way of correlating one's interests with the public, the level of claims, the basis for the formation of beliefs, value orientations, worldview. It is also the basis for the formation of human social feelings: feelings dignity, duty, responsibility, conscience, moral and aesthetic principles, etc. Thus, "I" is an essential element of the personality structure, it is the highest, regulatory and predictive spiritual and semantic center. Subjectively, for an individual, a person acts as an image of his "I" - it is he who serves as the basis for internal self-esteem and represents how an individual sees himself in the present, future, how he would like to be, what he could be if he wanted to. . The process of correlating the image of "I" with real life circumstances, resulting in the motivations and orientation of the individual, serves as the basis for self-education, that is, for the constant process of improvement, development of one's own personality. A person as a person is not some finished given. It is a process that requires tireless mental work.

The main resulting property of the personality is the worldview. It is the privilege of a person who has risen to high level spirituality. Man asks himself: who am I? Why did I come into this world? what is the meaning of my life, my purpose? Am I living according to the dictates of being or not? Only having developed one or another worldview, a person, self-determining in life, gets the opportunity to act consciously, purposefully, realizing his essence. A worldview is like a bridge that connects a person and the whole world around him.

Simultaneously with the formation of the worldview, the character of the personality is also formed - the psychological core of a person, stabilizing his social forms of activity. "It is only in character that the individual acquires his permanent definiteness."

The word "character", used as a synonym for the word "personality", means, as a rule, a measure of personal strength, that is, willpower, which is also the resulting indicator of personality. Willpower makes the worldview integral, stable and gives it an effective force. People with a strong will have a strong character. Such people are usually respected and rightly perceived as leaders, knowing what can be expected from such a person. It is recognized that the one who achieves great goals by his actions, meeting the requirements of objective, reasonably justified and socially significant ideals, serving as a beacon for others, has a great character. He strives to achieve not only objectively, but also subjectively justified goals, and the energy of the will has a worthy content. If, on the other hand, a person's character loses its objectivity, being crushed for random, petty, empty purposes, then it turns into stubbornness, becomes deformedly subjective. Stubbornness is no longer a character, but a parody of it. By preventing a person from communicating with others, it has a repulsive power.

Without will, neither morality nor citizenship is possible; in general, social self-affirmation of the human individual as a person is impossible.

A special component of personality is its morality. The moral essence of a person is "tested" for many things. Social circumstances often lead to the fact that a person faced with a choice does not always follow himself, the ethical imperative of his personality. At such moments, he becomes a puppet of social forces, and this causes irreparable damage to the integrity of his personality. People react differently to trials: one personality can “flatten” under the blows of the hammer of social violence, while the other can become hardened. Only highly moral and deeply intellectual personalities experience an acute sense of tragedy from the consciousness of their “non-personality”, that is, the inability to do what the innermost meaning of “I” dictates. Only a freely manifesting personality can retain self-respect. The measure of the subjective freedom of the individual is determined by its moral imperative and is an indicator of the degree of development of the personality itself.

In a person it is important to see not only the united and common, but also the unique, peculiar. An in-depth comprehension of the essence of a person involves considering it not only as a social, but also as an individual and original being. The uniqueness of a person is already manifested at the biological level. Nature itself vigilantly preserves in a person not only his generic essence, but also the unique, special in him, stored in his gene pool. All cells of the body contain genetically controlled specific molecules that make this individual biologically unique: a child is born already with the gift of uniqueness. The diversity of human individuality is astounding, and at this level even animals are unique: anyone who has ever had the opportunity to observe the behavior of several animals of the same species under the same conditions, could not help but notice the differences in their "characters". The uniqueness of people is striking even in its external manifestation. However, its true meaning is connected not so much with appearance a person, how much with his inner spiritual world, with a special way of his being in the world, with his manner of behavior, communication with people and nature. The uniqueness of individuals has significant social meaning. What is personal uniqueness? Personality includes common features that are characteristic of it as a representative of the human race: it is also characterized by special features as a representative certain society with its specific socio-political, national. historical traditions, forms of culture. But at the same time, a personality is something unique, which is connected, firstly, with its hereditary characteristics and, secondly, with the unique conditions of the microenvironment in which it is nurtured. But that is not all. Hereditary features, unique conditions of the microenvironment and the activity of the individual unfolding in these conditions create a unique personal experience - all this together forms the socio-psychological uniqueness of the individual. But individuality is not a certain sum of these aspects, but their organic unity, such an alloy that is in fact indecomposable into its components: a person cannot arbitrarily tear one thing from himself and replace it with another, he is always burdened with the luggage of his biography. . “Individuality is indivisibility, unity, integrity, infinity; from head to toe, from the first to the last atom, through and through, everywhere I am an individual being.” Is it possible in this case to say about someone that he has nothing of his own at all? Of course not. A particular person always has something of his own, even if it is a unique stupidity that does not allow him to adequately assess the situation and himself in this situation.

Individuality is not, of course, some kind of absolute, it does not have complete and final completeness, which is a condition for its constant movement, change, development, but at the same time, individuality is the most stable invariant of a person’s personal structure, changing and at the same time unchanged throughout of a person's life, hiding under many shells, the most tender part of him is the soul.

What is the significance of the unique features of the individual in the life of society? What would society be like if it suddenly happened that, for some reason, all the people in it would be on the same face, with stamped brains, thoughts, feelings, abilities? Imagine such a thought experiment: all the people of a given society were somehow artificially mixed into a homogeneous mass of the physical and spiritual, from which the hand of an omnipotent experimenter, dividing this mass exactly in half into female and male parts, made everyone of the same type and equal to each other in everything. . Could this double sameness form a normal society?

Diversity of individualities is an essential condition and form of manifestation successful development society. Individual uniqueness and originality of a person is not just the greatest social value, but an urgent need for the development of a healthy, reasonably organized society.

Man, collective and society. Formation and development

The problem of the individual cannot be taken seriously without a clear philosophical formulation of the question of the relationship between the individual and society. In what forms does it appear?

The connection between the individual and society is mediated primarily by the primary team: family, educational, labor. It is only through the collective that each member enters society. Hence, its decisive role is clear - the role of an extremely important “cell” of an integral social organism, where the personality develops spiritually and physically, where, by assimilating the language and mastering the socially developed forms of activity, it absorbs in one way or another what was created by the works of its predecessors. The direct forms of communication that take shape in a team form social ties, shaping the image of each person. Through the primary collective there is a "return" to the personal society and the achievements of society - the individual. And just as each individual bears the stamp of his collective, so each collective bears the stamp of its constituent members: being a formative principle for individuals, it is itself shaped by them. The collective is not something faceless, continuous and homogeneous. In this respect, he is a combination of different unique personalities. And in it the personality does not sink, does not dissolve, but is revealed and asserts itself. Performing this or that social function, each person also plays his own individually unique role, which has a single basis in a huge range of various types of activity. In a developed team, a person rises to the realization of the significance of his personality.

If the collective, absorbing the personality, is itself formed by its members, then the goals of this formation are set for it by society as a whole. Here it is necessary to distinguish between formal (official) and so-called informal (unofficial) collectives. The latter are united, as a rule, according to interests - these are clubs, societies, sections, here the connections between their members are characterized by greater freedom of personal manifestations, relations of friendship, sympathy, in these groups, as a rule, the creative manifestation of forces is higher.

Nowadays, with a fairly well-developed socio-psychological service, enterprises are pursuing a policy of creating labor collectives, where all their members would also be united according to informal signs: in this case, we are talking about people's abilities, their own assessment of their capabilities and everyone's understanding that he really in his place and that he is a necessary, equal, equally respected member of the team. But even in every formal collective, the functions of a person are not limited only to his socially assigned role, people are united not only by purely production relations, but also by other interests: political, moral, aesthetic, scientific views and thoughts, most often life problems especially close to them.

Since, as already mentioned, each member of the team is a personality, an individuality with its own special understanding, experience, mindset and character, even in the most closely knit team, disagreements and even contradictions are possible. Under the conditions of the presence of the latter, both the collective and each individual person are “tested for strength” whether the contradiction will reach antagonism, or whether it will be overcome by common efforts for the common good.

MAN IN THE FLOW OF HISTORY

Concrete-historical understanding of personality

The relationship between man and society has changed significantly in the course of history. Along with this, the specific content, the specific content and the personality itself also changed. A retrospective look at history reveals to us the richness and diversity of personality types characteristic of certain types of cultures and worldviews: antiquity. Middle Ages, Renaissance, modern times, etc.

The personality of the 20th century differs sharply, for example, from the personality of even the not so distant historical past, for example. personalities of the XVIII-XIX centuries. This is connected not only with cultural epochs in the history of mankind, but also with the change of socio-economic formations.

Under the tribal system, personal interests were suppressed by the interests of the survival of the genus as a whole (and, therefore, of each individual belonging to this genus), each adult individual performed the role rigidly assigned to it by the genus and the power of traditions. Society as a whole in its life was guided by rituals, customs of ancestors. In human activity organically realized for him in the primitive. undeveloped forms of its generic, social essence. This was the first historical stage in the development of the human personality, the inner spiritual world of which was filled with undivided social and natural being, acting in an animated form of the action of supernatural forces.

With the emergence of slaveholding and feudal formations, antique II medieval cultures, a new type of relationship between the individual and society arises. In these societies, in which classes with different and opposing interests were formed, and as a result, the state was formed along with officially formalized legal relations of citizens in it, individuals (free citizens in a slave-owning society and citizens of a feudal society) began to act as subjects of rights and obligations. This meant the recognition of a certain independence of action for a separate individual, and, accordingly, the ability of the individual to be responsible for his actions was envisaged. There was already a turbulent process of the formation of a personality that bore the stamp, on the one hand, of class collectivism, and on the other, of class limitation, which ultimately determined its content, forms of social activity or passivity, lifestyle and its worldview. However, despite the general exploitative essence of both formations, the personality of the era of antiquity differed sharply from the personality of feudal society: they lived in conditions of different types of cultures. Ancient society is a pagan society. The man himself and the whole society in general were perceived in the image and likeness of the cosmos, hence the understanding of the predetermined fate of man. A person could, of course, be independent in solving his earthly affairs, but in the last resort, he still realized himself as an instrument of the cosmic world order, embodied in the idea of ​​fate. Each had his own destiny, and he was not free to change it as he wished. The worldview of the ancient personality remained mythological.

During the Middle Ages in the Christian religion, the individual was recognized as an integral autonomous entity. Her spiritual world became more complex and refined: she came into intimate contact with a personified god. The worldview of a Christianized person was colored with an eschatological motif - hence its focus on a closed spiritual life, the improvement of the spirit - the soul, the cultivation of a sense of humility and non-resistance. There was a kind of sublimation of the corporeal with the spiritual, associated with the preparation for the afterlife. The religious principle permeated all the pores of human existence, which determined the corresponding way of life. The personality of the era of early Christianity is characterized by purely personal heroism - asceticism. The intense inner life of the individual, with the moral and ideological core, which is the focus of the mental "I", expanding, embraced the entire sphere of his personality, leaving little room for biological and social components. In the life of a medieval personality, a large place is occupied by the moral values in contrast to utilitarian-material values.

In the new cultural environment associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalist forms of economy, a new type of personality is born. In the Renaissance, the freedom of man was very acutely realized, autonomy for God was realized as autonomy for man himself: from now on, man is the manager of his own destiny, endowed with freedom of choice. The dignity of man lies in the fact that he is involved in everything earthly and heavenly - from the lowest to the highest. Freedom of choice means for him a kind of cosmic looseness, independence of creative self-determination; man tasted the ecstasy of the boundless possibilities of his essential forces and felt himself the master of the world. In the Age of Enlightenment, the mind took a dominant position: everything was questioned and criticized that could not stand the test of the power of reason. This meant a significant rationalization of all aspects of social life, but, among other things, it meant mainly the flourishing of science. In interpersonal relations wedged, as it were, a mediating link - technology. The rationalization of life meant the narrowing of the emotional-spiritual side of the inner world of the individual. Value orientations and worldview have also changed. With the approval and development of capitalism, such personal qualities as willpower, efficiency, talent were endowed with the highest value, which, however, had a downside - egoism, individualism, ruthlessness, etc. The further development of capitalism led to a global alienation of the individual. A personality of an individualistic type has developed with a pluralistic worldview, with a material orientation. Its mental and spiritual values ​​are being replaced by rationalistic-pragmatic orientations. Describing the psychology of individualism, A. Schopenhauer stated that everyone wants to rule over everything and destroy everything that opposes him, everyone considers himself the center of the world, prefers his own existence and well-being to everything else, is ready to destroy the world. just to support your own "I" a little longer. Everyone regards himself as an end, while everyone else is only a means to him. Thus, the principle of utilitarianism penetrates into human relations. The psychology of individualism inevitably leads to an acute sense of loneliness and mutual alienation of people.

MAN AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM

Human nature. Dialectic of Essence and Existence

Turning to a "concrete" person. The whole history of both philosophical teachings and special natural and human sciences testifies to tireless attempts to understand the nature of man, the meaning of his existence and development prospects. The efforts of many scientists to develop a holistic theory of man have always encountered serious difficulties, related, in particular, to the fact that the special sciences of man provided only fragmentary knowledge - about individual aspects of the life of his organism, consciousness and behavior, and not about man as a whole. Meanwhile, the need to create a holistic picture of human existence was growing more and more, in which a person would act not just as a thing among other things, but as a subject of social and cultural-historical activity, an acting and feeling being with a complex and unique inner world.

A special place in the history of philosophy is occupied by the 30-40s of the 19th century, because they were marked by the turn of many philosophers towards the “living”, “concrete” existence of man (S. Kierkegaard), the formation of the anthropological principle in philosophy (L. Feuerbach) and the emergence of fundamentally new ideas about man (K. Marx, F. Engels). This turn was caused primarily by socio-historical reasons, the development of the capitalist mode of production, when private entrepreneurship increasingly demanded liberation from feudal fetters, the manifestation of personal initiative, enterprise, and the creative inclinations of a person. The question was: who is the real subject of history, what are the ways and means of transforming a person from an alienated into a free creator of his own destiny?

It is quite natural that the problems of a concrete, real person, to which Kierkegaard, the Young Hegelians, and Feuerbach addressed themselves, rose to their full height before Marx and Engels. Since the previous searches did not lead to success and the "concrete" man still remained abstract, the task, according to Engels, was to replace the cult of abstract man with the science of real persons in their historical development.

Characteristic of the traditional idealistic and religious ideas about man was his separation from nature. Man was portrayed as one of the creations of God, as a moment of "world reason", "world idea" (objective-idealistic trends) or as "pure subjectivity", "pure self-. consciousness” (subjective-idealistic trends).

In contrast to idealistic interpretations, the Marxist concept of man proceeds from the recognition of the unity of man and nature and is based on a materialistic understanding of man as a natural being. A person is not a fragment or a product of some supernatural force, but a part of the objective, material world, a bodily being.

However, the Marxist understanding of man is by no means limited to defining him as a natural being, a "part" of nature. Such a definition would not go beyond the solution of the problem of man in pre-Marxist (metaphysical) materialism, which underestimated the role of the subject's active abilities and actually subordinated him to the laws of nature, reduced him to the state of things among things.

K. Marx and F. Engels attached decisive importance in the development of man to labor, which by its nature is a collective, social activity. In the process of labor, new human social qualities (consciousness, language, worldview, etc.) were formed in comparison with the animal ancestor. Therefore, in the Marxist concept, man appeared not simply as a part of nature, but as the highest product of its development, as a natural being of a special kind. In other words, the specificity of the social nature of man as a "generic being" was revealed. This approach opened up the possibility of analyzing a person in the context of not only his natural, but also social ties, interpreting him as a carrier of not only a biological form of the movement of matter, but also a social one. The human individual “is a product, on the one hand, of his natural organization, and on the other hand, of the conditions surrounding a person throughout his life. . . » .

At the same time, a person is not just a “product” environment but also its creator. Through consciously purposeful actions, he actively changes the environment and, in the course of its transformation, changes himself. Therefore, revealing the specifics of a person as a natural being and his difference from an animal, K. Marx put forward a very important position that a person is an active natural being with vital forces that are embedded in him “in the form of inclinations and abilities”.

Revealing the essence of man, K. Marx, first of all, was looking for that condition common to all people, which became an integral and determining factor in their being and which made them people. This is labor, which is "the eternal natural condition of human life." In work, activity, the highest form of which is revolutionary and transformative activity, the specificity of a person is manifested.

The objective reality transformed by human labor, the products of human labor become human reality, "the world of man", "second nature". The products of human labor are the “second”, “humanized”, “humanized” nature in relation to the “first”, that is, natural nature.

Unlike pre-Marxist thinkers, who did not see any connection between the essence of man and humanized nature, industry, technology, etc., Marx showed that the objective existence of industry and its history are "an open book of human essential forces." Reading this book leads to the knowledge of the essence of man in its realized, objectified, that is, translated into reality, form.

In the sixth thesis about Feuerbach, K. Marx came to the conclusion: “. . . the essence of man is not an abstract inherent in a separate individual. In its reality, it is the totality of all social relations.

This formulation of K. Marx contains a very deep thought, but it is expressed in an extremely concise form, which often led to its one-sided interpretation. Some interpret this proposition in such a way that Marx allegedly identified the essence of man with the existing social relations of a given social system. Others believe that he reduced the understanding of man to the totality of production relations alone. Still others argue that the aforementioned position does not express the active, active essence of a person.

In reality, the specified thesis of K. Marx had as its goal, first of all, to oppose the abstract anthropological understanding of man only as a part of nature (for example, L. Feuerbach) to understand him as a social entity, in other words, as a set of social relations (in a literal translation, “ensemble "of these relationships).

K. Marx and F. Engels emphasized that it is wrong to identify the essence of a person either with pure subjectivity (for example, self-consciousness) or with the objective form of manifestation of the essence (objectified results of activity). The essence of man is revealed in the special nature of his objective activity. It follows from this that in order to understand the essence of a person, it is necessary to analyze not just the totality of social relations, as something external to a person, but the dialectic of the interaction of the creative forces of a person with the social structure within which his activity unfolds. In addition, the definition of the generic essence of a person as the totality of "all social relations" means that it is formed not only by these relations in which the individual exists, but also by the entire previous history of mankind, its culture.

The ratio of biological and social in man. Man as a unique biological species Homosapiens arose about 40 thousand years ago as a result of a long process of the formation of society, which at the same time was the period of the formation of man. Thus, it arose as a result of a single process of anthroposociogenesis. With the formation of thinking and language, the simultaneous formation of production, socio-economic relations began as a special type of matter - social matter. Its originality lies in the fact that, being objective and primary in relation to social consciousness, it, unlike natural matter, cannot exist without consciousness. Man is the highest level of organization of matter, conscious of itself. The ability to produce tools is a specific difference between man and animal.

From the very beginning of his formation, a person did not have a biological predestination to any one, predetermined type of life activity (as is the case with animals). The morphological structure of a person is such that it allows him to carry out any type of activity. Thus, he acts not as a being closed in himself, but as a being “open to the world”, universal in its creative possibilities and manifestations.

In progress historical development human body remains in general themes However, individual changes in it occur extremely slowly and are not significant. Even the average brain modern man preserved as it was among the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals - about 1400 cubic centimeters. According to some reports, there was even a decrease in brain volume from 1450 cubic centimeters in Neanderthals (who lived 100 thousand years ago) to 1350 cubic centimeters in modern humans, which was associated with a large development of association centers in its frontotemporal regions.

According to physiologists, only 1/10 of the capabilities of the brain is used by a person, although the flow of information perceived by him now and the level of solving problems of processing it significantly exceed the corresponding parameters of the recent past. All this gives reason to conclude that the further evolution of the brain will not be due to an increase in the number nerve cells and the weight of the brain, but at the expense of hidden reserves: for example, by complicating the connections between cells, their more appropriate use, and, as scientists believe, primarily at the expense of those parts of the brain that are in charge of complex logical operations. In the light of the foregoing, the pessimistic forecasts of some Western scientists who predict the degeneration of mankind as a result of involution (wrinkling) or too rapid evolution of the brain seem unfounded.

The decisive influence on human development of the social factor does not lead to the disappearance of the natural in man. They are in dialectical unity and interaction. Under the influence of human activity, the biological has largely (but not completely) undergone modification and has reached a higher level of development in a number of respects than that of other representatives of the animal world, that is, “humanized”.

Although the biological structures and functions of the human body show something in common with higher animals, they also contain something essentially new, formed as a result of human labor activity. The advantage of man over animals is that his life activity is under the control of his consciousness and will, and that he has learned to produce not only to satisfy his immediate physiological needs, but also for other people. Therefore, an object produced by a person acquires socially significant properties, and needs and sensuality develop more and more. In the course of this development, there appears "a musical ear that senses the beauty of the shape of the eyes - in short, such senses as are capable of human enjoyment. . . » .

Therefore, the biological in man is not only that which genetically brings man closer and makes him related to the animal ancestor, but also something new (due to the morphophysical characteristics of the organism) in which he differs from the animal. The uniqueness of a person is due to the fact that, unlike animals, he, along with the genetic program (which is encoded in hereditary structures, written in DNA molecules and passes from generation to generation through germ cells), has the ability, due to the presence of consciousness, through education, to pass on the experience of previous generations to each next generation. .

There is a very common tendency among Western scientists to absolutize the role of the biological factor in the structure of man. The logic of their reasoning is as follows: since human nature has a biological character, it cannot be changed, and, therefore, any social programs aimed at the formation and education of a new person are useless.

IN last years under the influence of the achievements of molecular and general genetics, various kinds of eugenic utopias began to appear, which consider it possible and necessary to improve a person by genetic methods. Some of the supporters of these methods set the task of improving all of humanity, others - to create only a caste of geniuses, scientists who will manage "inferior" slaves. All this is justified by the idea of ​​human genetic degeneration under the pressure of mutations, harmful changes in heredity, as well as the assumption that a person is still burdened with a complex of genes inherited from an animal ancestor and which are the source of his aggressiveness and other vices.

By itself, posing the question of the possibility of intervening in the mechanism of human heredity in order to change its genetic structure marks new approach to the study of the human body and, in particular, opens up the possibility of treating various types of hereditary diseases and protecting heredity from the harmful effects of radiation on it, some chemical compounds and other external factors. However, many scientists rightly emphasize the inadmissibility of ignorant interference in human heredity, the need to demonstrate the social responsibility of a scientist, oppose the threat of some eugenicists to turn humanity into an experimental herd, into a testing ground for growing some new breed of people through mass selection. The idea of ​​developing standardized geniuses diverts attention from the tasks of the social reorganization of the world, ignores the greatest value of spiritual uniqueness, the uniqueness of the individual.

Man is a complex biosocial structure, covering a wide range of aspects of human life - from physiological to social. Biological and social are two classes of stable components (substructures) that make up the structure of a person as an integral system. At the same time, the relationship between the biological and the social should be understood not as a juxtaposition, but as subordination. In this ratio, the social retains a priority, namely, an integrative and transformative role. Although the natural basis of a person is his biological characteristics, yet the determining factors of a person (his essence) are not his natural qualities (for example, one or another type of higher nervous activity, circulatory and respiratory systems, skin and hair color, etc.), and socially significant qualities. The combination of these qualities forms the concept of personality.

Essence and existence. The real image of a person (his reality) is not reduced to the category of essence, since it includes not only the very generic essence of a person, but also his concrete historical existence. The concept of existence is richer than essence, because it includes not only manifestations of the essential forces of a person, but also the diversity of his specific social, biological, moral, psychological qualities, the features of his daily life. The existence of a person is a form of manifestation of his essence.

In non-Marxist literature, it is incorrectly asserted that Marx's definition of the essence of man reduces all the wealth of human being to one social relationship and leaves in the shade the diverse aspects of human existence as a unique individual being. In reality, the definition of man as a social essence does not at all mean reducing the entire wealth of the existence of the human personality to its essence. Marxism considers man in the unity of essence and existence. At the same time, it is emphasized that only the definition of the essence of man as a socially active being makes it possible for scientific analysis and his individual existence. On the other hand, the way to the knowledge of the essence of man lies through the knowledge of the forms of his existence.

Analyzing the dialectic of essence and existence, K. Marx emphasized that "we must know what human nature is in general and how it is modified in each historically given era." In other words, a person is a dialectical unity of the general (universal, generic), special (formational, class) and individual (individual mode of existence).

The development of a person's sociality, the appropriation of his social essence by him is not straightforward, but contradictory due to the multifaceted development of a person as a person and the ambiguous influence of public institutions on him in various socio-historical conditions. At a certain stage of history, in conditions of an antagonistic division of labor, this influence has a retarding effect on the development of the essential forces of man. The products of human activity (in a broad sense, that is, not only products of labor, but also money, socio-political institutions and relations, forms of social consciousness, etc.) are alienated from man, turn into an independent force independent of people, dominating them and hostile to them.

The merit of the founders of Marxism lies in the fact that they not only revealed the source of alienation in the sphere of material activity, but also made an important conclusion about the possibility and historical inevitability of eliminating human alienation. In order to return to man his alienated essence, it is necessary to turn alienated labor into labor that would be a free manifestation of life and therefore “enjoyment of life” (Marx).

Correlation of the concepts "man", "individual", "personality", "individuality". long time in Marxist literature, these concepts hardly differed and were used as something interchangeable. Gradually, this approach was overcome. These terms are similar, but not identical. At the same time, the distinction between these concepts should not lead to the other extreme - their sharp distinction and opposition.

The most common generic term is a man. Man is the subject of socio-historical activity and culture, or, more precisely, the subject of given social relations and thus of the global historical and cultural process. Being the highest stage in the development of living organisms on Earth, it by its nature represents a unity of social and natural qualities, which are reflected in the definition of a person as an integral multi-complex biosocial (biopsychosocial) system.

An individual is a single representative of the human race, particular from the general, a single person - regardless of his real anthropological and social characteristics. The born child is an individual, but he is not yet a human individuality. An individual becomes an individuality as he ceases to be only a "unit" of the human race and acquires the relative independence of his being in society, becomes a personality.

A personality is a human individual taken in terms of his social qualities (views, abilities, needs, interests, moral convictions, etc.). It is a dynamic, relatively stable holistic system of intellectual, socio-cultural and moral-volitional qualities of a person, expressed in individual characteristics his consciousness and activity. ". . . The essence of a “special personality,” wrote K. Marx, “is not her beard, not her blood, not her abstract physical nature, but its social quality. . . ". The social qualities of a person are manifested in her actions, deeds, in her attitude towards other people. By these outwardly manifested actions, as well as through questionnaires, tests and self-observation, one can to a certain extent judge the inner world of a person, his spiritual and moral qualities.

The internal content of the personality is not the result of the mechanical introduction of various external influences into its consciousness, but the result of its internal work, in the process of which the external, having passed through the subjectivity of the personality, is processed, mastered and applied by it in practical activities. The system of social qualities educated and independently developed by the individual that has developed in this way manifests itself in a subjective form (ideas, values, interests, orientation, etc.), reflecting the interaction of the individual with the surrounding objective world. The concept of personality characterizes a person as an active subject of social relations. At the same time, each person is not only a subject, but also an object of activity, a set of functions (roles) that he performs due to the existing division of labor, belonging to a particular class or social group with their ideology and psychology. The nature of the individual's worldview, formed by the social environment, upbringing and self-education, is one of its most important qualities, its "core". The outlook of the individual largely determines the direction and characteristics of all socially significant decisions and actions.

If by its essence the personality is social, then by the way of its existence it is individual. Individuality is a unique, original way of being of a particular person as a subject of independent activity, an individual form of human social life. It expresses the individual's own world, his special way of life, which in its content is determined by social conditions, and in origin, structure and form is of an individual character. The essence of individuality is revealed in the identity of a particular individual, his ability to be himself. The important role of natural inclinations, inborn features in its development is mediated by social factors. Individuality is the unity of the unique and universal properties of a person, complete system, which is formed in the process of dialectical interaction of its qualities - general, typical (general human natural-anthropological and social characteristics), special (concrete historical, formational) and single (unique bodily and spiritual and mental characteristics). As the historical development of human labor activity, there is an ever greater differentiation of human relations and individuals, the individualization of a person and his relations in various areas vital activity. Marxism-Leninism emphasizes the greatest value of individuality, the development of which plays important role in human history as one of necessary conditions his progress.

2. The problem of freedom

The history of the development of mankind is, in a certain sense, the history of the development of its freedom and culture. ". . . Every step forward on the path of culture was a step towards freedom. Among the essential human forces, freedom occupies a special place, because without it a person cannot practically realize the intended goals, develop as a person. The need for freedom is deeply embedded in man, it is connected with the very essence of his nature.

The laws of social development eventually make their way, but not in each individual case, but through many individual decisions. At the same time, people do not always spontaneously follow external necessity, they support it or resist it, thereby demonstrating their free will and consciousness. This means that there is always a certain scope for individual choice and decision. People themselves make history, although not arbitrarily.

Freedom is a product of social development, and the degree to which it is possessed depends on concrete historical conditions. Therefore, A. Gramsci rightly wrote: "The measure of freedom is included in the concept of man." From this it follows that a person does not have complete, once and for all acquired freedom, but only a certain “measure” of it, which is a variable and dependent value. The measure of freedom as a whole depends on the level of development of the productive forces, the degree of knowledge of objective laws by a person, and on the nature of the socio-political system of a particular society.

In the process of goal-setting practical activity, the freedom of the individual unfolds in various aspects, goes through various phases - from the individual's subjective (internal) awareness of his freedom, the ability to act one way or another to its objective realization (if there are conditions for this). A person has the opportunity to choose the goals of his activity in advance. But these goals are not the result of his subjectivist whim or arbitrariness (for in this case, freedom would not be real, but illusory); they are generated by the objective conditions of human life, ultimately by objective necessity. Therefore, the goal-setting (subjective, internal) activity of a person is ultimately a form of objective, external processes in nature and society, although “it seems to a person that his goals are taken outside the world, independent of the world (“freedom”).

The individual feels his freedom primarily as a personal feeling, consisting in the ability to make a choice, the ability to act one way or another. However, the nature of freedom is not limited to this subjective aspect. Since man is an active being, freedom of choice passes on the next higher steps into freedom of decision, and then into freedom of action, that is, into objective freedom.

Analyzing the dialectic of internal and external, the founders of Marxism-Leninism always emphasized the need to study nature subjective aspect human activity, the role of internal impulses of this activity. Noting the versatility of human freedom, K. Marx singled out not only its objective, but also its subjective aspect: “. . . freedom refers not only to what I live by, but also how I live, not only the fact that I exercise freedom, but also the fact that I do it freely” ^ that is, internally free, independently, not according to coercion, but according to their convictions.

This aspect is called inner spiritual freedom. Inner freedom is a specifically human selective and coordinated activity of consciousness, will and moral forces of a person in the process of his purposeful and expedient activity, it is an opportunity to independently make a choice, make a decision and bring it to life.

The most important components of a person's inner freedom include the following: 1) knowledge of the possibility to act one way or another (ultimately, knowledge of external necessity); 2) comparison, coordination by the individual of this perceived external necessity with his inner convictions, conscience, personal interests: 3) manifestation of the will (choice and decision) and the responsibility arising from this; 4) the desire for self-realization, self-realization in the objective world.

This shows that the problem of inner freedom is by no means a narrow problem, closed in itself, limited to the purely inner world of the individual and not connected with outside world and human practice, as it may seem at first glance.

The Marxist understanding of freedom is often distorted by its opponents, who wrongly reduce this understanding to the well-known formula "freedom is a recognized necessity", coming from Spinoza, developed by Hegel and used by the founders of Marxism. Criticizing this formula, they believe that if the concept of freedom is associated with the knowledge of necessity, then a person guided by this understanding will inevitably fall into the subordination of necessity, although conscious, will be doomed to passivity.

However, the Marxist definition of freedom, as shown above, is by no means limited to this formula, since it fixes not the very essence of a free act, but only its prerequisite, a condition (“realization of necessity”). The defining moments of the Marxist understanding of the essence of freedom include, firstly, the principle of practical activity, the realization of a recognized need, and, secondly, the principle of the correspondence of the choice made to the inner convictions of a person, his personal interests.

The knowledge of external necessity is one of the conditions for freedom, but it is by no means always sufficient. Situations are possible when a choice that outwardly seems free (even if it is made on the basis of knowledge and consideration of objective necessity), in fact, upon closer examination, turns out to be not free, since it was made reluctantly, that is, contrary to the inner convictions of a person, his conscience, personal interests. A really free choice is a choice, the content of which is not something external and alien to a person, but corresponds to his inner desires.

However inner world a person is not isolated from the outside, he is formed under the influence of a certain social environment, and a person’s motivations are ultimately determined by his worldview and interests. Therefore, when evaluating a particular choice, one must take into account the social orientation of these motives, what and to whom honesty and sincerity objectively serve - social progress or reaction.

Since the freedom of an individual can serve as the basis not only for positive values, but also for everything connected with injustice, unscrupulousness, immorality, the very fact of free, independent choice cannot serve as the only principle of moral evaluation of a person’s act. Therefore, the Marxist understanding connects the problem of inner freedom, freedom of choice with the objective content of those values ​​(positive or negative) that a person chooses, with an assessment of the social significance and direction of his motives. Only on this basis is it possible to correctly assess the actions of a person.

In contrast to the existentialist understanding of freedom, which reduces the problem of moral responsibility and duty to the responsibility of a person only in relation to himself, to his personal motives, the Marxist understanding proceeds from the fact that when assessing a particular choice, it is necessary to take into account the degree of responsibility of a person not only to himself. themselves, but also before society, humanity. A sense of social responsibility must permeate all manifestations of human freedom. Anarchist-irresponsible, unmotivated “freedom” is no longer freedom in the true sense of the word. In the same way, the subjectivist orientation of the individual only towards responsibility to himself, to his personal motives, also does not yet lead to true freedom. The latter is possible under the condition of moral responsibility and moral duty of the individual in relation to society, because the moral measure of freedom is social responsibility.

Only within the framework of practical activity, freed from the fetters of private property, is it possible to realize the true essence of man, his essential forces, his freedom. The path to freedom of the individual is the path of the comprehensive development of his spiritual and physical abilities.

3. About the meaning of life

The question of the meaning of human life is closely connected with the understanding of the specifics of man as a generic being, his nature and essence.

The human race, understood as historically successive generations of people, has certain specific features that qualitatively distinguish it from other "communities" (for example, herds of monkeys, ants, bees, etc.). Universal, generic qualities include the desire for knowledge, beauty, creative activity and all-round development, the presence of certain universal norms of morality (the so-called simple norms of morality and justice), etc. However, it does not follow from this that there is some kind of eternal, unchanging human nature, on which one could rely in determining the meaning of life. On the contrary, all history testifies to the continuous change of human nature.

Being an individual form of manifestation of the human race, an individual cannot realize the meaning of his life without realizing himself as a person. Awareness of one's personality does not occur on a whim and is not bestowed "from above", but only as a result of comparing oneself with one's own kind. The very posing of a question about the meaning of life by a person is possible only when he awakens awareness of his “I”, a sense of human dignity, when he begins to think about the problem of the objective significance of his life.

In every historical era, society faces certain tasks, the solution of which directly affects a person's understanding of the meaning of his life. As the material conditions of people's lives, their social and cultural demands, the class structure of society changed, so did people's ideas about the meaning of life. And yet, attempts were often made to determine some eternal meaning of life, unambiguous for all people and for all times. In addition to the traditional religious concept (“prepare oneself for the afterlife”), interpretations of the meaning of life were put forward from the standpoint of abstract virtue (“serve the truth, goodness”), maximum satisfaction biological needs human (“strive for pleasures”), existential-pessimistic (“man is born for suffering and death”), etc.

However, the concept of the meaning of life is not something prepared in advance for man by the forces standing above man and the world, as philosophers of an objective-idealistic persuasion and theologians believe. Man himself is the creator of the meaning of life. But this does not mean that he forms this meaning at his own discretion, following only purely individual interests or unconscious instincts, inner intuition, etc., as representatives of subjective idealism believe.

Attempts to determine a formula suitable for all people in all historical epochs, that is, a certain "eternal formula" of the meaning of life, were doomed from the very beginning to failure, because in different historical epochs the meaning of life is revealed each time in a new way and largely depends on the worldview. orientation of the individual. As humanity develops, the meaning of life always means something new and different, but this does not mean that in every era it is completely new and completely different. In understanding the meaning of life, its most general principles, there is a certain continuity arising from a certain continuity in the development of human culture.

The history of class societies shows that representatives of different classes understood the meaning of their lives in different ways, in accordance with the needs and goals determined by their social position. In societies built on the principles of private property, the ruling classes are characterized by individualistic, selfish and consumer ideas about the meaning of life. The “self-affirmation” of the individual in the context of the confrontation of private interests is carried out primarily through the possession of money, things, etc. The idea of ​​​​universal spiritual development of man, the search for great humanistic ideals and goals are being replaced by the race of acquisitiveness, which is daily advertised by the idea that the purpose of a person is to be a consumer being. The contradiction between technical equipment, material wealth and the lack of high ideals under certain conditions gives rise to disharmony of the spirit, apathy, pessimistic attitudes about the meaning of human existence.

At the same time, history and modern social practice are rich in examples of such an understanding of the meaning of life, when people do not passively adapt to the spontaneous laws of social development, but see the meaning of their life in changing the existing situation in accordance with ideals that provide them with the most complete and meaningful life. . Only within the framework of activity, freed from various forms of spiritual intoxication, is there an opportunity for genuine self-affirmation of a person, the realization of his creative powers, and, therefore, for gaining the true meaning of life. “The meaning of life,” wrote A. M. Gorky, “I see in creativity, and creativity is self-sufficient and limitless.”

It should, however, be said that neither work in itself nor leisure activities are sufficient in themselves to give meaning to a person's life if the principles of advanced morality are not at the basis of his activity, if he is not inspired by socially significant ideals.

From the above, it can be concluded that correct understanding the meaning of life develops when a person is able to distinguish between true and false values, realizes the futility of the positions of individualism, the meaninglessness of life only for himself, that is, when the desire to achieve personal success is in line with public interests, and personal happiness is acquired in the process of activity for the common good. The deepest meaning of a person's life is to comprehensively develop his abilities, realizing them in activities for the benefit of people. It is this activity that receives recognition from society, the team and at the same time brings a person deep satisfaction and personal happiness.

But what is the meaning of a man's life if he knows that he is mortal? According to some people, all aspirations for the common good, the struggle for a better future, the development of science, space flights - all this turns out to be insignificant before the “mystery of death”. Sometimes one can hear from believers that atheists, on the question of the meaning of life, are moving away from a theoretical understanding of the problem of human mortality, giving a person “a stone instead of bread”, and that only religion can answer this question, because it tears off the cover of falsehood and puts us face to face. with undisguised reality - the inevitability of death in earthly life and the need for faith in the immortality of the soul.

Religious worldview, using the natural desire of a person for self-preservation and taking into account the existence of a psychological barrier of fear of death, claims to overcome this barrier by pointing to the possibility of resurrection and immortality. In reality, this is an illusory attempt to solve the problem.

The problem of mortality is, of course, important, but its discussion must be linked to life. Life and death negate each other, but not absolutely, because death is a necessary moment and a natural result of the life of an organism. ". . . The negation of life, - wrote F. Engels, - is essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought in relation to its necessary result, which is constantly in its embryo, - death.

The realization that a person lives only once, that death is inevitable, to a certain extent stimulates the activity of a person, constantly returns him to the question of the meaning of life, about the possibilities and ways of exercising one's abilities, one's vocation, one's role in people's efforts to build life, happy for everyone. Certain boundaries of a person's life make him act, make decisions now, and not postpone his decisions and actions indefinitely or waste his strength in vain.

However, a person does not act because he foresees inevitable death. The driving force of human actions is rooted primarily in the need to satisfy their basic needs. Therefore, although a person must remember his mortality, it does not follow at all that in the face of death his life has no meaning. The history of human development refutes this essentially pathological point of view. After all, the wisdom of a person is not to be in the power of thoughts about death, but to think about life. Epicurus argued that death for a person is nothing, “because when we exist, death is not yet present; and when death is present, then we do not exist,” that is, when we live, there is no death, and when it has come, we no longer exist.

The same idea was expressed by L. N. Tolstoy in response to the question whether he is afraid of death: human life- this is consciousness, as long as I have consciousness, I will not die, and when I do not have consciousness, then it will not matter to me. It does not follow from this, however, that Tolstoy was indifferent to the question of what would happen "after". All his work is imbued with painful thoughts about life and death, good and evil, about the problems of religion. Questions about the meaning of life and death are one of the most important topics of his artistic and journalistic works, entries in diaries. The solution of these questions reflected the internal inconsistency of Tolstoy's worldview. He is known to have sharply criticized the theology Orthodox Church. And at the same time, he tried to create his own religious and ethical concept, seeing the purpose of a person in moral self-improvement. Tolstoy's statements directed against religious statements about the "immortality of the soul" are interesting: "We are talking about the life of the soul after death. But if the soul will live after death, then it must have lived before life. A one-sided eternity is nonsense.” Denying the "immortality of the soul". Tolstoy believed in the "immortality of the spirit", but already devoid of such personal qualities as consciousness, individuality, "I".

A person's awareness of the inevitability of his death, grief for the deceased contain, of course, tragic motives. But this tragedy is to some extent mitigated (but not removed) by the fact that an individual, being a representative of the human race, remains to live in the race through the products of his creativity. If a person realizes that his life was not lived aimlessly, that he left behind good deeds that are necessary and useful for other people, then he does not feel alone, abandoned, forgotten, and the problem of personal death does not come to the fore, obscuring everything else, and by no means exhausted by the fact of physical death. Such a person asserts his immortality through the immortality of deeds and deeds, his contribution to the material and spiritual progress of mankind.

Human - the only being who knows that it is transient, and at the same time fighting for eternity, for prolonging his life, for leaving a good memory of himself in the minds of future generations. Humane socio-economic transformations, the development of science, the improvement of medicine, the fight against environmental pollution, etc. contribute to the extension of human life. The physical death of a person does not yet mean the spiritual death of him as a person. If a person sets socially significant goals for himself, makes his contribution for the benefit of people, then he, as it were, imprints himself in the material and spiritual values ​​\u200b\u200bcreated by him, remains to live in these values, in the memory of people. The death of a person who is socially undeveloped and has been concerned all his life only with the satisfaction of his physiological needs, that is, only a consumer, means, of course, his death as a person, its disappearance without a trace.

CONCLUSION

A person is an integral unity of biological (organismic), mental and social levels, which are formed from two: natural and social, hereditary and acquired in vivo. At the same time, the human individual is not a simple arithmetic sum biological, mental and social, and their integral unity, leading to the emergence of a new qualitative stage - the human personality.

The main resulting property of the personality is the worldview.

A special component of personality is its morality.

Personality is a measure of the wholeness of a person. Without inner wholeness, there is no personality.

The concept of human uniqueness is essential in social cognition, in comprehending social phenomena and events, in understanding the mechanism of the functioning and development of society, and in effectively managing it.

A person is formed and modified under the influence of joint activity, and in this sense, he is both the subject and object of the influence of social forces and social relations.

Human society is the highest level of organization of living systems. Personality does not dissolve in society: while retaining the value of a unique and independent individuality, it contributes to the life of the social whole.

Man is the subject of socio-historical activity and culture, or, more precisely, the subject of given social relations and thus of the global historical and cultural process. Being the highest stage in the development of living organisms on Earth, it by its nature represents a unity of social and natural qualities, which are reflected in the definition of a person as an integral multi-complex biosocial (biopsychosocial) system.

The degree of human freedom depends on the nature and level of development of society, on society's concern for meeting the material and spiritual needs of the individual, that is, human freedom is closely related to the freedom of society. On the other hand, the free development of society depends on the free development of each of its members, "the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all."

The meaning of human life is revealed in a variety of activities - in work, education, family life, passion for science, literature and art, in active social activity, etc. At the same time, labor and production are not an end in themselves, but a necessary prerequisite and a real basis for creating objective conditions so that each person can prove himself, develop his abilities, discover talents, that is, so that he has a real opportunity to freely develop as a creatively active person.

The vocation, the purpose of each person is not to prepare oneself for the "afterlife", but also not to strive for unlimited satisfaction of one's biological needs and instincts, but to develop one's physical and spiritual powers, all one's capabilities. In the struggle for earthly goals, for the creation worthy man conditions of life, in the fight against the many-sided forms of evil, a man of great soul and bright dreams is formed, full of faith in the significance of the values ​​he has chosen, for which it is worth living.

Bibliography

A. G. Myslivchenko, A. P. Sheptulin. Dialectical and historical materialism, M., 1988.

A. G. Spirkin. Fundamentals of Philosophy, M., 1988.

The two main concepts of social science - man and society, have always been inseparable, and not only for this discipline. They historically arose simultaneously, giving birth to each other. In other words, people got the right to be called that when they consciously began to live together. At the moment, the subject of the study of anthropogenesis (part of evolution, which concerns the formation of a person as a species) are both biological factors and social prerequisites and the process of the emergence and development of society - sociogenesis.

Biosocial nature of man

A person lives in society - this is one of the key features of his biosocial nature, a fundamental difference from animals, in addition to upright walking, consciousness and, as a result, speech, and, most importantly, labor. It was from the consideration of the phenomenon of labor that philosophers of the century before last, for example, F. Engels and K. Marx, began to say that human nature is biosocial. They laid down a whole scientific concept that combines two concepts - the biological species of man and the society that he builds with his labor.

Newborns are born completely dependent on their parents in all areas of their lives. And in this, people are not much different from animals. Although the period of growing up of children in humans is the longest among any biological species, not a single cub survives without older individuals. But the adult continues to strive to be part of the community. First, to jointly meet their physiological needs. But most importantly, social science unites a person and society because the company of their own kind is important for people in spiritual terms. At all times, one of the worst tortures was solitary confinement, driving anyone crazy. And the suffering of people lost on uninhabited islands - favorite heroes of adventure novels - is by no means fiction.

Public institutions

These are communities, united by activity, that respond to the specific social and physiological needs of individuals. And again there is a synergy of man and society. Social science identifies five areas of activity of such institutions.

Spiritual and religious.

Political.

Economic.

Cultural, which includes education and science.

Social (including family and marriage).

They meet the diverse needs of each individual, from the basic (food, sleep, safety) to the spiritual. But we can only take care of these needs together.

What does society expect from a person?

Social science operates with a basic unit - a person, and their totality - a social system. As in any system, it has its own laws of interaction between parts and levels. And never society can not consist of one person. And he, in turn, cannot live alone, as he pleases.

Any interaction of elements and levels of any system is subject to certain rules, otherwise destruction and chaos await it. Social norms of behavior are divided into:

Legal.

Spiritual and moral.

Religious.

Traditional.

Each person must abide by these rules, for the sake of freedom to create and choose their own destiny, based on the joint satisfaction of basic needs. After all, humanity has long realized that together in any field people can achieve more.

post-industrial society

At the moment, humanity is building a post-industrial society:

The main direction of work - services and sales.

Most of the production is automated through computer technology.

Information - main value, therefore, the instruments of its transmission affect society to a large extent: social media, Mass media, Internet.

Human personality and happiness are given paramount importance. In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, in general, the very life of every citizen is the main value.

Society members. Every person can change his social position at any moment.

Scientists continue to study the biosocial phenomenon of the synergy of man and society, and the world that they created together.

Social science terms

Block "Man and Society"

1. 
   Man is a biosocial being with conscious speech, moral qualities and the ability to make tools.
2. 
   An individual is a representative of the human race, endowed from birth with special qualities that are distinctive from other people.
3. 
   Individuality - specific features that distinguish a person from the totality of their own kind (external and internal).
4. 
   Personality is a human individual who is the subject of conscious activity, possessing a set of socially significant features, properties and qualities that he implements in public life.
5. 
   Socialization is the process of assimilation by an individual of patterns of behavior, social roles and norms, spiritual values.
6. 
   Agents of socialization - institutions that play the most important role in the process of socialization (family, education, army, inner circle)
7. 
   Society is a part of the surrounding world isolated from nature, but closely connected with it, which is a combination of all ways of interaction and forms of unification of people.
8. 
   Worldview - a system of views, concepts and ideas about the world around.
9. 
   Truth is objective knowledge that accurately expresses the essence and properties of the subject under consideration.
10. 
    Absolute truth is an undeniable, once and for all established knowledge, a kind of ideal towards which our knowledge aspires.
11. 
    Relative truth is incomplete, limited knowledge.
12. 
    Thinking is an active process of reflecting the objective world in concepts, judgments, theories
13. 
    Activity is a form of a person's active relationship to the world around him, involving its expedient changes and transformations.
14. 
    Cognition is a process of human activity, the main content of which is the reflection of objective reality in his mind, and the result is the acquisition of new knowledge about the world around him.
15. 
    Needs are the needs of a person for what is necessary to maintain his body and develop his personality.
16. 
    Freedom is a specific way of being a person, associated with his ability to choose a decision and perform an act in accordance with his goals, interests, ideals and assessments, based on the awareness of the objective properties and relations of things, the laws of the world around him.
17. 
    Responsibility is a socio-philosophical and sociological concept that characterizes an objective, historically specific type of relationship between an individual, a team, and society from the point of view of the conscious implementation of the mutual requirements placed on them.
18. 
    Culture is the totality of all types of transforming human activity, aimed both at the external environment and at himself.
19. 
    Science is a form of people's spiritual activity aimed at producing knowledge about nature, society and knowledge itself, with the immediate goal of comprehending the truth and discovering objective laws.
20. 
    Education is one of the ways of becoming a person through the acquisition of knowledge by people, the acquisition of skills and abilities for the development of mental, cognitive and creative abilities through a system of social institutions such as family, school, and the media.
21. 
    Religion - belief in the supernatural; a set of views and ideas, a system of beliefs and rituals that unites people who recognize them into a single community.
22. 
    Art - Practical activities human, aimed at the development and creation of aesthetic values.
23. 
    Morality is a form of social consciousness, consisting of a system of values ​​and requirements that regulate people's behavior.
24. 
    Social progress - the direction of the development of society, which is characterized by a transition from lower to higher, from less perfect to more perfect.
25. 
    Globalization is the process of integration of states and peoples in different fields of activity.
26. 
    Scientific knowledge is a special kind of cognitive activity aimed at developing objective, systematically organized and substantiated knowledge about nature, man and society.
27. 
    Social cognition is the process of acquiring and developing knowledge about a person and society.
28. 
    Spiritual culture - a set of spiritual values ​​and creative activities for their production, development and application: science, art, religion, morality, politics, law and others.

Block "Economy":

1. 
   Factors of production - resources that are involved in the process of production of goods and services.
2. 
   Factor income - income received from factors of production ( wage, rent, profit, interest).
3. 
   Demand is the willingness and ability of consumers to purchase products at every possible price level.
4. 
   Supply - the desire and ability of sellers to sell products at every possible price level.
5. 
   An economic system is an established and operating set of principles, rules, laws that determine the form and content of the main economic relations that arise in the process of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of an economic product.
6. 
   Costs (expenses) are a monetary assessment of the cost of material, labor, financial and other resources for the production and sale of products for a certain period of time.
7. 
   Securities is a document drawn up in accordance with the established form and in the presence of mandatory details, certifying property rights, the implementation or transfer of which is possible only upon presentation of this document.
8. 
   Unemployment is a socio-economic phenomenon in which part of the able-bodied population cannot find a job and becomes a reserve army of labor.
9. 
   Inflation is a long-term steady upward trend in the average (general) price level.
10. 
    Economic growth is a long-term increase in the real volume of the gross domestic product (GDP) both in absolute terms and per each inhabitant of the country.
11. 
    GDP is the annual market value of final goods and services produced by the economy on a territorial basis.
12. 
    Taxes are obligatory payments of individuals and legal entities to the state.
13. 
    The state budget is an estimate of state revenues and expenditures for a certain period of time, compiled with an indication of the sources of state revenues and directions, channels for spending money.
14. 
    Business cycle - periodic fluctuations in the levels of employment, production and inflation.
15. 
    The labor market is the sphere of formation of demand and supply of labor (labor services).
16. 
    Equilibrium price - the price at which the quantity demanded is equal to the quantity supplied
17. 
    Competition - rivalry between participants in the market economy for the best conditions for the production and sale of goods.

Block "Social relations":

1. 
   Social stratification is a set of vertically arranged layers (strata), whose representatives differ from each other in an unequal amount of power and material wealth, rights and obligations, privileges and prestige.
2. 
   Social mobility is the movement of groups and individuals in the social structure of society, the change in their status.
3. 
   Social elevator is the mechanism of the way through which one can change one's social position.
4. 
   Social groups - collections of people (2 or more) who have common views and are connected with each other in relatively stable models of social interaction.
5. 
   Ethnic communities are stable groups of people that have historically developed in a certain territory and have common features of culture, language, self-consciousness, historical memory, as well as awareness of their interests, their unity, differences from other similar entities.
6. 
   Social conflict - clash of interests of individuals and groups.
7. 
   Social norms - a rule of behavior established in society that regulates relations between people.
8. 
   Social control is a system of prescriptions, prohibitions, beliefs, coercive measures, which ensures compliance and streamlines the interaction between individuals.
9. 
   Sanctions are means of encouragement and punishment that encourage people to comply with social norms.
10. 
    Family - social group, whose members are related by ties of kinship, marriage or adoption and live together, cooperating economically and caring for children.
11. 
    Deviant behavior - behavior that deviates from the norms or set of norms accepted by a significant part of society.
12. 
    Social role - a model of behavior corresponding to the status that a person occupies.
13. 
    Social status - the position of a person in society, occupied by him in accordance with age, gender, social status, profession, and implies certain rights and obligations.
14. 
    A social institution is a historically established, stable and fixed in the norms of morality, law, a system of social relations.

Block "Politics"

1. 
   Power is the ability of one side (individual or group) to influence the behavior of the other side, regardless of whether this latter is ready to cooperate or not.
2. 
   The state is an organization of political power that manages society within a certain territory and has sovereignty.
3. 
   A political system is a set of interactions between political subjects and relations between them related to the exercise of political power, organized on a single normative-value basis.
4. 
   The political regime is a set of ways and methods of interaction between state power and the population.
5. 
   The form of the state is a set of characteristics that determine the way the organization and structure of the state.
6. 
   Democracy is a way of political organization of society, based on the participation of citizens in the formation and exercise of state power, the adoption of political decisions by the majority while respecting the interests of the minority.
7. 
   Civil society is a sphere of self-manifestation of free citizens and voluntarily formed organizations protected by relevant laws from direct interference and arbitrary regulation by the state authorities.
8. 
   The rule of law is a democratic state in which the principle of the rule of law, rights’ and freedom of man and citizen is implemented, and there is mutual responsibility of the state and citizens.
9. 
   The political elite is a relatively small social group that has concentrated a significant amount of state power in its hands.
10. 
    A political party is an organization whose members are united by common goals, ideals and strive to obtain and exercise power.
11. 
    Socio-political movement - an organization that is created on the basis of common interests for the implementation of common goals by influencing state power
12. 
    The political leader is the leading person in the political process, which has a permanent and decisive influence on the political transformations in the country.
13. 
    Electoral system - the procedure for electing representative institutions and elected officials, as well as determining the results of voting.
14. 
    The political process is a set of actions of political subjects aimed at exercising their roles and functions within the framework of the political system, at realizing their own interests and goals.
15. 
    Political participation - the actions of a citizen in order to influence the adoption and implementation of government decisions, the choice of representatives in government institutions.
16. 
    Political culture is a set of norms and values ​​that are shared by the majority of citizens and find expression in their political activity, in the assessment of political events and in relation to the policy and its components.
17. 
    Political ideology is a formed system of values, focused on the expression of political interests, the basis for the formation of the goals of political actions.
18. 
    Absenteeism is a form of apoliticality, manifested in the evasion of voters from participating in referendums and elections to government bodies.

Block "Right":

1. 
   Law - a set of generally binding, formally defined rules of conduct established or sanctioned by the state and provided by its coercive force.
2. 
   The constitutional system is a system of social, economic and political-legal relations established and protected by the constitution and other constitutional-legal acts of the state.
3. 
   Legal responsibility is the application of measures of state coercion to the offender for committing an unlawful act.
4. 
   Legal capacity (civil) - the ability of a citizen to acquire and exercise civil rights by their actions, create civic obligations for themselves and fulfill them (from the age of 18 full)
5. 
   Branch of law - a set of legal norms governing a certain area of ​​public relations
6. 
   Institute of law - a group of legal norms governing any particular type of homogeneous social relations. Example: the institution of labor protection in labor law
7. 
   Civil law is a branch of private law that regulates property and personal non-property relations.
8. 
   Organizational and legal forms of entrepreneurial activity - a set of property and organizational differences, ways of forming the property base, features of the interaction of owners, founders, participants, their responsibility to each other and contracts.
9. 
   Property rights - rights arising from the possession of any property or its transfer from one person to another.
10. 
    Non-property rights (personal rights) are a special category of civil rights that belong to a citizen from birth and are inalienable from him.
11. 
    Labor law is an independent branch of law that regulates relations in the sphere of labor.
12. 
    An employment contract is an agreement between an employee and an employer that describes the mutual rights and obligations of the parties.
13. 
    Family law is a branch of law that regulates personal and derivative property relations arising from marriage, consanguinity, adoption of children in a family for upbringing.
14. 
    A marriage contract is an agreement between persons entering into marriage or an agreement between spouses that determines the property rights and obligations of spouses in marriage and (or) in the event of its dissolution.
15. 
    Marriage is a legally registered, free, voluntary union of a man and a woman, aimed at creating a family and giving rise to mutual rights and obligations for them.
16. 
    International humanitarian law - a set of international legal norms and principles governing the protection of victims of war, as well as limiting the methods and means of warfare.
17. 
    Administrative law is a branch of law that regulates social relations arising in the process of exercising executive power by state bodies
18. 
    Environmental law is a set of legal norms that regulate social relations in the field of interaction between society and nature in the interests of the conservation and rational use of the natural environment.
19. 
    Citizenship is a stable legal relationship of a person with the state, expressed in the totality of their mutual rights, duties and responsibilities.
20. 
    Criminal law is a branch of public law that regulates relations that arise in connection with the commission of a crime.
21. 
    Criminal process - pre-trial and judicial proceedings in a criminal case.
22. 
    Measure of restraint - a special group of measures of procedural coercion, which are ways and means of restricting the personal freedom of the accused, and in exceptional cases - the suspect.
23. 
    Legal relations are relations between people regulated by the rules of law.
24. 
    An offense is a socially dangerous guilty act (action or inaction) that is contrary to the rule of law and harmful to society, the state or individuals, entailing legal liability.
25. 
    A normative legal act is a legal document issued in a special procedural manner by a competent state authority that establishes or repeals the rules for regulating public relations.
26. 
    Alternative civilian service is a special type of labor activity in the interests of society and the state, carried out by citizens instead of military service.
27. 
    Law enforcement agencies are bodies that carry out law enforcement activities, possessing the appropriate competence and the necessary material resources.