Philosophy of life: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

The irrationalist trend that developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its emergence was associated with the rapid development of biology, psychology and other sciences, which revealed the failure of the mechanistic picture of the world. At the center of this philosophy lies the concept of life as an absolute, infinite, unique beginning of the world, which, unlike matter and consciousness, is actively, diversely, eternally moving.

Arthur Schopenhauer - German idealist philosopher; earned himself fame as a brilliant essayist. He considered himself a follower of Kant. When interpreting his philosophical views, the main emphasis was placed on the doctrine of a priori forms of sensibility to the detriment of the doctrine of the categorical structure of thinking. He singled out two aspects of understanding the subject: the one that is given as an object of perception, and the one that is the subject in itself. The world as a representation is entirely conditioned by the subject and is a sphere of visibility.

Schopenhauer is a supporter of voluntarism. Will in his teaching appears as a cosmic principle underlying the universe. Will, being a dark and mysterious force, is extremely egocentric, which means for each individual an eternal desire, anxiety, conflicts with other people.

The aesthetic ideal of Schopenhauer is in Buddhist nirvana, in the killing of the "will to live", in complete asceticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher, one of the founders of modern irrationalism in the form of a philosophy of life. His views have undergone a certain evolution from a romantic esthesia of the experience of culture through a "reassessment of all values" and a critique of "European nihilism" to a comprehensive concept of voluntarism.

The main provisions of the mature philosophy of Nietzsche are:

everything that exists is the will to power, power;

the world itself is a multitude of warring pictures of the world, or perspectives emanating from centers of power - perspectivism.

Nietzsche is a resolute opponent of the opposition of the "true world" accelerated in European culture to the empiric world, the origins of which he sees in the denial of life, in decadence. Nietzsche connects the critique of metaphysics with the critique of language. The deep internal inconsistency of Nietzsche's vitalism is manifested in the question of the relationship between the truth of this or that doctrine, idea, concept, etc. and their historical genesis. Major works: "Human, too human", "Merry Science", "Beyond Good", "Antichristian".

THE PROBLEM OF BEING IN A. SCHOPENHAUER, F. NIETZSCHE, A. BERGSON, K. MARX

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). One of the brightest figures of irrationalism is Arthur Schopenhauer, who was dissatisfied with Hegel's optimistic rationalism and dialectics.

The basis of the world, according to Schopenhauer, is the will, which subjugates the intellect.

How strong the will is stronger than the intellect, according to Schopenhauer, can be judged by one's own actions, because almost all of them are dictated not by the arguments of reason, but by instincts and desires. The strongest instinct in life is sexual love, that is, procreation, but in fact - the reproduction of new generations for suffering, torment and inevitable death.

Schopenhauer denied all the tenets of Christianity, including the immortality of the soul. According to Schopenhauer, the domination of world evil and faith in God are incompatible.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher and philologist, the brightest propagandist of individualism, voluntarism and irrationalism.

According to Nietzsche, the world is a constant becoming and aimlessness, which is expressed in the idea of ​​"the eternal return of the same".

Following Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche called the will the basis of the world:

As the driving force of becoming;

Like a rush;

As "will to power";

The will to expand your Self, to expand. Nietzsche's central concept is the idea of ​​life. He is the founder of the direction, which is called the philosophy of life.

In man, according to Nietzsche, the main thing is the principle of corporality and, in general, the biological organism; the intellect is only the highest layer necessary for the preservation of organismic formations, primarily instincts.

Henri Bergson. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) - French thinker, representative of intuitionism and philosophy of life.

Bergson's views can be defined as a departure from the materialistic-mechanistic and positivist direction of philosophical thought.

Most important are his teachings: on the intensity of sensations; time; free will; memory in its relation to time; creative evolution; the role of intuition in understanding things.

Bergson proposed life as a substance as a kind of integrity that differs from matter and spirit: life is directed "up", and matter - "down".

The meaning of life, according to Bergson, is comprehensible only with the help of intuition, interpreted as a kind of sympathy, accessible to direct penetration into the essence of an object by merging with its unique nature.

Issues that interested Bergson:

Soul and body;

The idea of ​​spiritual energy;

Dreams, etc.

They were of particular importance to him because:

He wanted to "liberate" the spirit from the body and thereby prove the possibility of the immortality of the soul;

His interest in spiritualism and telepathy was connected with them.

Karl Marx. Karl Marx (1818-1883) - philosopher and socialist, creator of the "Communist Manifesto", founder of historical materialism.

Marx and Engels create their own new philosophy called "new materialism".

Applying materialist dialectics to the analysis of social life, K. Marx made two discoveries: the "secret" of surplus value in capitalist society; materialistic understanding of history.

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN A. SCHOPENHAUER, F. NIETZSCHE, K. MARX, A. BERGSON, W. JAMES

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Arthur Schopenhauer did not agree with the concept of the mind as an area of ​​conscious mental activity of human consciousness, introducing unconsciously irrational moments into it.

Schopenhauer saw the basic fact of consciousness in representation.

Intuition is the first and most important view knowledge. The whole world of reflection is built on intuition.

According to Schopenhauer, only contemplation, free from any relation to practice and to the interests of the will, can be truly perfect knowledge. Scientific thinking is always conscious, because it is aware of its principles and actions, while the activity of the artist, on the contrary, is unconscious, irrational: it is not able to understand its own essence.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The form of presentation of philosophical ideas by Friedrich Nietzsche is aphorisms, myths, sermons, polemics, declarations.

According to Nietzsche, in the mind are connected:

Antique installation on the value of the objective world, the focus of attention on it;

Personal skill of working consciousness with itself. Nietzsche sought to create the foundations of a new morality of the "superman" instead of the Christian one, to find a new path of religious consciousness. The world according to Nietzsche:

This is life, which is not identical with organic processes: its sign is becoming;

This is the will to power.

Karl Marx(1818-1883). Karl Marx was the ancestor of the idea of ​​the secondary nature of consciousness, its conditionality, determinism by factors external to it and, above all, by economic ones.

According to Marx, it is not consciousness that determines being and the world of phenomena, but vice versa: being determines consciousness, consciousness is conscious being.

Karl Marx argued that a person, his consciousness and his entire spiritual life are determined by graceless social and economic relations.

Marx proposed to analyze consciousness and its content through the study of subject-practical forms of human activity, that is, to analyze consciousness woven into the existence of people.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Henri Bergson is one of the brightest representatives of the philosophy of life.

The most important philosophical work of Bergson is the "Experience on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", in which he introduces the concept of "pure duration" - the essence of consciousness and being.

Bergson, in his philosophy, turned to the life of our consciousness: after all, it is given to us directly in our self-consciousness, which shows that the finest fabric of mental life is duration, i.e., continuous variability of states.

Bergson's doctrine of the nature of consciousness and the conditions for the possibility of an open society was characterized in its time as a revolution in philosophy.

William James (1842–1910). William James is a North American philosopher, in his opinion, consciousness is dissected and has an expedient structure.

One of the most famous works of James - "Does Consciousness Exist", in which the philosopher denies the existence of consciousness as a special entity related to something.

In his opinion, the personality (a certain volitional center), and not consciousness, refers to the flow of sensations and experiences, which are the last reality given to us in experience.

Z. FREUD, HIS FOLLOWERS AND OPPONENTS

Sigmund Freud is an Austrian psychologist, neuropathologist, psychiatrist, he is characterized by studies of the phenomena of the unconscious, their nature, forms and methods of manifestation.

Freud's main works containing philosophical ideas and concepts:

- "Mass psychology and analysis of the human "I"";

- “Beyond the pleasure principle”;

- "I" and "It";

- "Psychology of the Unconscious";

- "Dissatisfaction in culture";

- "Civilization and analysis of the human "I"" and others. Freud put forward:

The hypothesis of the exclusive role of sexuality in the emergence of neuroses;

A statement about the role of the unconscious and the possibility of its knowledge through the interpretation of dreams;

The hypothesis that the mental activity of the unconscious is subject to the principle of pleasure, and the mental activity of the subconscious - to the principle of reality.

For Freud's philosophy, the main idea is that people's behavior is controlled by irrational mental forces, and not by the laws of social development, that the intellect is an apparatus for disguising these forces, and not a means of actively reflecting reality, of ever more in-depth understanding of it.

Freud's main study is the role of the most important, in his opinion, engine of a person's mental life - "libido" (sexual desire), which determines contradictions:

Human and social environment;

Human and culture;

Man and civilization.

Through the prism of sublimation, Freud considered:

Formation of religious rites and cults;

The emergence of science;

Self-development of mankind.

From the side of philosophy, Freud gives his understanding of man and culture. Culture appears to him as a "Super-I", based on the refusal to satisfy the desires of the unconscious, it exists due to the sublimated energy of the libido.

In his work "Dissatisfaction in Culture", Freud concludes that the progress of culture reduces human happiness, increases a person's sense of guilt due to the restriction of his natural desires.

In considering the social organization of society, Freud focuses not on its supra-individual nature, but on a person's natural tendency to destruction, aggression, which can be curbed by culture.

Carl Gustav Jung is a Swiss psychologist, philosopher, culturologist, he began his career as the closest associate of Sigmund Freud and popularizer of his ideas.

After Jung's break with Freud, there is a revision of ideas about the origin of human creativity and the development of human culture from the point of view of "libido" and "sublimation", the displacement of sexuality and all manifestations of the unconscious through the "Super-I".

"Libido" in Jung's understanding is not just some kind of sexual desire, but a flow of vital-psychic energy. Jung introduced into scientific research such objects as the doctrine of karma, reincarnation, parapsychological phenomena, etc. The main works of K.G. Jung: "Metamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido"; "Psychological types"; "Relations between the Self and the Unconscious"; "An Attempt at a Psychological Interpretation of the Dogma of the Trinity".

The most interesting representative of neo-Freudianism was Erich Fromm.

Main works: "Escape from freedom"; "Concept M

FREUD'S PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NEOFREUDISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Sigmund Freud - Austrian psychologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, he studied the phenomena of the unconscious, their nature, forms and ways of manifestation.

The main works of Freud, which contain philosophical ideas and concepts: "Mass psychology and analysis of the human "I""; "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"; "I" and "It"; "Psychology of the Unconscious"; "Dissatisfaction in culture"; "Civilization and analysis of the human "I"", etc.

Freud put forward a hypothesis about the role of the unconscious and the possibility of its knowledge through the interpretation of dreams.

Freud assumed that the mental activity of the unconscious is subject to the pleasure principle, and the mental activity of the subconscious is subject to the reality principle.

The main thing in the philosophy of Sigmund Freud was the idea that people's behavior is controlled by irrational mental forces, and not by the laws of social development, that the intellect is an apparatus for disguising these forces, and not a means of actively reflecting reality, more and more in-depth understanding of it.

The most important, according to Freud, the engine of a person's mental life is "libido" (sexual desire), which determines the contradictions between a person and the social environment, a person and culture, a person and civilization.

In his psychoanalysis, Freud considered:

Formation of religious cults and rituals;

The emergence of art and public institutions;

The emergence of science;

Self-development of mankind.

Freud argued that the main part of the human psyche is unconscious, that a person is in constant striving to satisfy his inclinations, desires, and society constitutes a hostile environment that seeks to limit or completely deprive a person of the satisfaction of his passions.

According to Freud, the personality is divided into the id; I (ego); Super-I (Super-ego).

It is the sphere of the unconscious, subordinated only to the principle of pleasure, it has no doubts, contradictions and denials.

Freud divides any instincts and associated drives into two opposite groups:

Ego drives (instincts of death, aggression, destruction);

Sexual instincts (life instincts).

Freud proposes to consider the consciousness of the individual as a system of external prohibitions and rules (Super-ego), and the true content of the individual (Ego) as something “supraconscious” (It), which contains impulsive drives and passions.

According to Freud's philosophy, consciousness creates various kinds of norms, laws, commandments, rules that suppress the subconscious sphere, being for it the censorship of the spirit.

The subconscious sphere manifests itself in the areas:

Abnormal (dreams, random reservations, typos, forgetting, etc.);

Abnormal (neurosis, psychosis, etc.). Neo-Freudianism is a trend in modern philosophy and psychology that combines the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud with American sociological theories. The main representatives of neo-Freudianism:

Karen Horney;

Harry Sullivan;

Erich From and others.

The main idea of ​​neo-Freudians was interpersonal relationships. Their main question was the question of how a person should live and what to do.

Society is recognized as hostile to the fundamental trends in the development of the individual and the transformation of his life values ​​and ideals.

THE IDEA OF THE SUPERMAN IN F. NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) - German philosopher and philologist, the brightest propagandist of individualism, voluntarism and irrationalism.

There are three periods in Nietzsche's work:

1) 1871–1876 (“The Birth of Tragedies from the Spirit of Music”, “Untimely Reflections”);

2) 1876–1877 (“Human, too human”, “Colorful opinions and sayings”, “The Wanderer and his shadow”, “Merry Science”) - a period of disappointment and criticism - “sober”;

3) 1887–1889 (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Twilight of the Idols”, “Antichrist”, “Nietzsche against Wagner”).

Cognition for Nietzsche is interpretation, interpretation, closely related to the inner life of a person, he rightly notes that the same text allows for multiple interpretations, since thought is a sign with many meanings. To understand a thing, it is necessary to translate the human into the natural, therefore one of the most important means of cognition is the translation of the human into the natural.

According to Nietzsche, man is “a disease of the Earth”, he is fleeting, he “is fundamentally something erroneous”. But it is necessary to create a genuine, new person - a "superman" who would give a goal, would be the winner of "being and nothingness" and would be honest, first of all to himself.

The main problem of man, his essence and nature is the problem of his spirit.

According to Nietzsche, spirit:

This is endurance;

Courage and freedom;

assertion of your will.

The main goal of human aspirations is not benefit, not pleasure, not truth, not the Christian God, but life. Life is cosmic and biological: it is the will to power as the principle of world existence and "eternal return". The will to live must manifest itself not in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a battle for power and superiority, for the formation of a new person.

In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims:

That man is something that must be overcome;

All beings created something that is higher than them;

People want to become the ebb of this great wave, they are ready to return to the beasts than to overcome man.

The real greatness of man is that he is a bridge, not a goal. Nietzsche wrote: "Man is a rope stretched between animals and the superman."

Nietzsche's superman is the meaning of being, the salt of the earth. In his opinion, the superman will take the place of the dead God. Nietzsche believes that the idea of ​​the superman as a goal to be achieved returns to man the lost meaning of existence. Superman can only come from a generation of aristocrats, masters by nature, in whom the will to power is not crushed by a culture hostile to it, from those who, united with their own kind, are able to resist the majority who do not want to know anything about the true destiny of modern people.

Nietzsche, under the influence of Dühring's physical and cosmological research, developed the idea of ​​eternal return, which should compensate for the hope for a possible future lost along with Christianity. eternal life behind the coffin If we follow this idea logically, then people are doomed to eternity, because they already live in eternity. Eternity, according to Nietzsche, coincides with the moment.

The main feature of the irrationalism of the 19th century lies in the criticism of reason, science, logic, systemicity, since rationality and its consequences destroy the ever-becoming and developing life itself. Representatives of this trend Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believe that the central characteristic human is something irrational, mystical, incomprehensible by means of science and logic, inexplicable and inexpressible in the conceptual thinking.

The reason for the emergence of irrationalism is the crisis of German transcendental philosophy. Representatives of the non-classical type of philosophy saw in I. Kant and G. Hegel only pure theory and scholastic schematism, which do not explain, but only simplify and schematize the contradictory and mysterious life. Therefore, the central task non-classical philosophy is to discover some primary irrational reality behind the dominance of rationality (“hungry will” in A. Schopenhauer, “absurd faith” in S. Kierkegaard, “will to power” in F. Nietzsche).

Like other representatives of non-classical philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) argues that the basis of man, his generic essence is not reason, but some kind of blind, unconscious life force, unreasonable will. The mind in human life plays a secondary and dependent on the role of the will.

Criticizing German classical philosophy, A. Schopenhauer, however, uses the main ideas and achievements of the latter. The main work of A. Schopenhauer "The World as Will and Representation" (1816) was written under the direct influence of the philosophy of I. Kant. Just as I. Kant distinguishes between “appearance” and the unknowable “thing in itself”, A. Schopenhauer considers the world as a representation (“appearance”) and as will (“thing in itself”). The world in which a person lives is declared by the philosopher to be an inauthentic world of representation. Here everything is an appearance, a mirage, a veil of Maya. In this world, it is almost impossible to distinguish between reality and dream, reality and appearance. In the world as a representation there is no place for freedom, because here, everything is subject to the power of reason, the dominance of space and time and the law of causality.

The true meaning of the world, the philosopher believes, is hidden and represents an irrational will. Will is the heart of the world, the grain of everything that exists, it manifests itself in all objects and phenomena. The will is not subject to the power of reason, it is reckless, eternal and infinite, absolutely free. The main property of the will is Overcoming itself. The eternally "hungry" will must "devour" itself, because it represents an endless striving, an eternal becoming. Its properties are insatiability, eternal dissatisfaction with what has been achieved and the endless overcoming of its frozen, ossified forms. The highest manifestation of the will, according to A. Schopenhauer, is a person, therefore, in his nature one can also find an eternal desire for the unknown, constant conflicts and the struggle with the world and with oneself, all this is a constant source of endless human suffering. Man, the philosopher believes, is doomed to suffering, getting rid of them is impossible. Being a big fan of philosophy Buddhism, A. Schopenhauer proposes to get rid of the inevitable human suffering by denying life itself, the source of which is the will (the cause of all suffering). The ideal and model for A. Schopenhauer is the asceticism of Christian ascetics and the achievement of Buddhist nirvana: a person remains to live, but life means nothing to him.

For Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who is often called the ideological forerunner of the philosophy of existentialism, the problem of human personalities, its originality and uniqueness, its tragic fate becomes the most important theme of all philosophy.

The main thing in a person, S. Kierkegaard believes, is not reason, but a mystical irrational riddle, which the philosopher calls existence (from Latin - existence). Reason and existence are opposite things. If Descartes says “I think, therefore I exist”, then S. Kierkegaard declares: “the less I think, the more I exist”, thus showing that the mind is completely helpless in revealing the secret of existence.

Existence is the deep mystical essence of a person, his core, a mystery that cannot be described or rationally defined in terms. No scientific or rational methods are suitable for the knowledge of man. A person can penetrate into the essence of human existence, discover the meaning of his life only in certain critical situations of vital choice, in the so-called existential situations, when the meaning of human life is revealed. The "meeting" with one's own existence does not take place in abstract thoughts, but in difficulty, risk and the choice of "either-or". Trying to reveal the essence of existence and discover the meaning of human life, S. Kierkegaard in his work "Stages on the path of life" considers the various stages of human existence.

At the aesthetic stage (symbol - Don Juan), a person is turned to the outside world, immersed in life feelings. The values ​​of this stage are youth, health, beauty. A person seeks to know and experience all kinds of pleasure: from the lowest, physical to the highest intellectual. This is the position of hedonism (life is pleasure). But the more a person indulges in pleasures, the stronger his dissatisfaction and disappointment become. A person is seized by boredom, which brings him to the brink of despair. A person realizes the untruth of his way of life and the need to choose a higher stage.

At the ethical stage (symbol - Socrates) is dominated by a sense of duty. Man voluntarily submits to the moral law. The disadvantage of this position, Kierkegaard believes, is the subordination of man to a universal law, that is, to something external in relation to his own existence. It turns out that a person at this stage cannot be himself in the true sense.

Only at the religious stage (the symbol is Abraham), when the mind cannot save a person and help him, does a person find himself alone with himself and the true absolute. Only an absurd faith can save a person. S. Kierkegaard believes that the meaning of human existence is revealed only through existential fear, through despair associated with the rejection of reason. Fear, like fire, burns all bridges, all illusions and reveals the true essence of a person and the meaning of his existence. As if "turning inside out" dialectics G. Hegel Kierkegaard believes that the comprehension of the meaning of human existence, the disclosure of the secrets of existence and the connection with the transcendent world is carried out instantly as a result of an irrational leap.

Criticism of the rationalism of the previous classical philosophy is also observed in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in whose work there are three stages: 1. "Romantic" period (1871-1876). The main works of this period: "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music", "Untimely Reflections". This is the period of romanticism, passion for classical ancient literature, music by R. Wagner, philosophy of A. Schopenhauer. 2. "Positivist" period (1876-1877). Main works: "Human, too human", "Various opinions and sayings", "The Wanderer and his shadow". This period is characterized by Nietzsche's fascination with the natural sciences, especially biology and the theory of Charles Darwin. 3. "Destructive" period (1877-1889). Major works: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil", "On the Genealogy of Morals". At this stage, the main headings of Nietzsche's philosophy were formulated and revealed: "the will to power", the furnace return of the same, the reassessment of all values, European nihilism, the idea of ​​the superman.

In his early work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, devoted to the analysis of ancient Greek culture, F. Nietzsche identifies two ontological principles that permeate Greek music, tragedy, philosophy and the whole culture as a whole.

The Dionysian beginning - the beginning is irrational, excessive, strong-willed Nietzsche characterizes it as soaring, dancing, creative, creative. This is the beginning of universality and unity. Apollonian - the beginning of reason and harmony, symmetry and measure; the beginning is systematic, conceptual, scientific, theoretical. F. Nietzsche believes that at the beginning of development in Greek tragedy, for example, in Aeschylus, the Dionysian choral principle prevails; the harmonious unity of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles is found in the tragedies of Sophocles, where the parties of the choir and heroes are almost equal; and in the future, the Apollonian beginning gradually begins to come to the fore, in particular with Euripides. In the middle of the 5th century BC. the Apollonian principle turns into a purely theoretical Socratic principle, emasculated, lifeless and dead. F. Nietzsche considered Socrates himself a “murderer” ancient philosophy and culture and the first Western European in spirit.

Life philosophy is a system of views of a person. The search for answers to the main questions in life, what is its meaning, why, what and how to do, does not stop. Since ancient times, the minds of philosophers have been philosophizing on this. Dozens of teachings have been formed, but still people ask themselves these questions.

What is the philosophy of life?

The concept of "philosophy of life" has two meanings:

1. Personal philosophy, in the center of which is the solution of existential questions about the human condition.
2. Philosophical trend that originated in Germany in the second half of the 19th century as a reaction to rationalism. Main Representatives:

• Wilhelm Dilthey;
• Henri Bergson;
• Pierre Ado;
• Friedrich Nietzsche;
• Georg Simmel;
• Arthur Schopenhauer.

The concept of life in philosophy

Life definition in philosophy occupied the minds of many thinkers. The term itself is ambiguous and can be considered from different points of view:

• biological (as a form of existence of matter);
• psychological (as a form of existence of consciousness);
• cultural and historical (as a form of human existence).

Philosophy of life - basic ideas

The philosophy of life united various directions united by common ideas. It arose as a reaction to the outdated philosophical traditions conditioned by rationalism. The ideas of the philosophy of life are that being is the fundamental principle, and only through it can something be comprehended. All rational methods of knowing the world are in the past. They are being replaced by irrational ones. Feelings, instincts, faith are the main tools for understanding reality.

Irrationalism and philosophy of life

Irrationalism is based on the uniqueness of human experience, the importance of instincts and feelings, as opposed to rational knowledge. He, like romanticism in literature, became a reaction to rationalism. It was reflected in the historicism and relativism of Wilhelm Dilthey. For him, all knowledge was conditioned by a personal historical perspective, so he asserted the importance of the humanities.

Johann Georg Hamann, a German philosopher, rejected the process of reflection, sought the truth in feeling and faith. Personal certainty is the ultimate criterion of truth. His colleague in the literary group "Storm and Onslaught" Friedrich Jacobi exalted the certainty and clarity of faith to the detriment of intellectual knowledge.

Friedrich Schelling and Henri Bergson, preoccupied with the uniqueness of human experience, turned to intuitionism, which "sees things invisible to science." Reason itself has not been annulled, it has lost its leading role. - the engine underlying existence. Pragmatism, existentialism, irrationalism is a philosophy of life that has expanded the idea of ​​human life and thought.

The meaning of human life - philosophy

The problem of the meaning of life in philosophy has been and remains relevant. Answers to the questions, what is the meaning of life and what makes life meaningful, have been sought by philosophers of various directions over the centuries:

1. Ancient philosophers were unanimous in the opinion that the essence of human life lies in the pursuit of good, happiness. For Socrates, happiness is equal to the perfection of the soul. For Aristotle - the embodiment of human essence. The essence of a person is his soul. Spiritual work, thinking and knowledge lead to the achievement of happiness. Epicurus saw meaning (happiness) in pleasure, which he represented not as pleasure, but as the absence of fear, physical and spiritual suffering.
2. In the Middle Ages in Europe, the idea of ​​the meaning of life was directly related to traditions, religious ideals and class values. Here there is a similarity with life philosophy in India, where the repetition of the life of ancestors, the preservation of class status are key.
3. Philosophers of the XIX-XX centuries believed that human life is meaningless and absurd. Schopenhauer argued that all religions and philosophies are just attempts to find meaning and make a meaningless life bearable. Existentialists, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, equated life with absurdity, and only a person could, by his own actions and choice, give it some meaning.
4. Modern positivist and pragmatic approaches argue that life acquires the meaning that is important for the individual within the framework of his reality. It can be anything - achievements, career, family, art, travel. What a particular person appreciates his life for and what he aspires to. This philosophy of life is very close to many modern people.

Philosophy of life and death

The problem of life and death in philosophy is one of the key ones. Death is the result of the process of life. Man like anyone biological organism mortal, but unlike other animals, he is aware of his mortality. This pushes him to think about the meaning of life and death. All philosophical teachings can be divided into two types:

1. No life after death. After death, there is no existence; together with the body of a person, his soul, his consciousness, also dies.
2. There is life after death. Religious-idealistic approach, life on earth is a preparation for or reincarnation.

Books on the philosophy of life for self-development

Fiction can be an excellent source for philosophical enlightenment. Not only scientific or popular science books written by philosophers introduce new philosophical ideas and give impetus. Five books that present the philosophy of human life:

1. "Outsider". Albert Camus. The book is fiction, in it the author managed to reflect the main ideas of existentialism, even better than in philosophical treatises.
2. "Siddhartha". Hermann Hesse. This book will take your thoughts from worries about the future to thoughts about the beauty of the present.
3. "The Picture of Dorian Grey". Oscar Wilde. A great book on the dangers of pride and vanity, in it the reader will find much self-reflection and sensory quest.
4. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche built one of the most original and radical philosophies in his entire history. His ideas continue to send shockwaves through the Christian community. Most people reject Nietzsche's slogan that "God is dead," but in this work, Nietzsche actually explains this statement and voices interesting ideas about life on earth.
5. "Transformation". Franz Kafka. Waking up one day, the hero of the story discovers that he has turned into a large insect...

Films about the philosophy of life

Directors turn to the theme of human life in their films. Movies about the philosophy of life that will make you think:

1. "Tree of Life". Directed by Terrence Malick. This movie raises millions of rhetorical questions about the meaning of life, the problem of human identity.
2. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". Michel Gondry's painting, released in 2004, is a kind of philosophical teaching on how to live your life, accept mistakes and not forget about them.
3. "Fountain". Fantastic movie from Darren Aranofsky will show new interpretations of reality.

Philosophy of life” and its representatives.

In the second half of the XIX century. within the framework of the irrationalist direction, the so-called philosophy of life develops. "Philosophy of life" - a direction that developed under the influence of F. Nietzsche in the last third of the 19th century. Its representatives were Dilthey, Bergson, Spengler and others. This trend arose as an opposition to classical rationalism and as a reaction to the crisis of mechanistic natural science. It turned to life as a primary reality, an integral organic process.

The very concept of life is ambiguous and indefinite, giving room for various interpretations. It is understood in biological, cosmological, and cultural-historical terms. Thus, in Nietzsche, the primary reality of life appears in the form of the "will to power." For Bergson, life is a "cosmic vital impulse", the essence of which is consciousness or superconsciousness. For Dilthey and Simmel, life appears as a stream of experiences, but culturally and historically conditioned.

However, in all interpretations, life is holistic process continuous creative formation, development, opposing mechanical inorganic formations, everything definite, frozen and “become”. That is why the problem of time as the essence of creativity, development, and formation was also of great importance in the philosophy of life. The theme of history, historical creativity is connected with a heightened sense of time.

Is it possible to comprehend life? If possible, then with the help of what means, methods, techniques, etc.? Some representatives of the philosophy of life believe that the phenomena of life are inexpressible in philosophical categories. Others believe that the process of life is not subject to the deadening, corrupting activity of the mind with its analysis and dissections. The mind, by its very nature, is hopelessly detached from life.

In general, anti-scientism dominates in the philosophy of life, and rational knowledge is declared here to be oriented towards the satisfaction of purely practical interests, acting from considerations of utilitarian expediency. Non-intellectual, intuitive, figurative-symbolic ways of comprehension (irrational in their basis) of life reality - intuition, understanding, etc. are opposed to scientific knowledge and its methods. world exploration.

The founder of the "academic" philosophy of life - Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), German cultural historian and philosopher. His main works are: Descriptive Psychology, Types of Worldview and Their Discovery in Metaphysical Systems, Sketches for a Critique of Historical Reason.

For Dilthey, life is a way of being a person, a cultural and historical reality. Man and history are not something different, and man himself is history, in which the essence of man is considered. Dilthey sharply separated the world of nature from the world of history, "life as a way of being a person." The German thinker singled out two aspects of the concept of "life": the interaction of living beings - this is in relation to nature; the interaction that exists between individuals in certain external conditions, comprehended regardless of changes in place and time - this is in relation to the human world. The understanding of life (in the unity of these two aspects) underlies the division of the sciences into two main classes. Some of them study the life of nature ( "natural sciences"), other ("sciences of the spirit")- life of people. Dilthey proved the independence of the subject and method of the humanities in relation to the natural sciences.

According to Dilthey, the comprehension of life, proceeding from itself, is the main goal of philosophy and other "sciences of the spirit", the subject of which is social reality in the fullness of its forms and manifestations. Therefore, the main task of humanitarian knowledge is the comprehension of the integrity and development of individual manifestations of life, their value conditioning. At the same time, Dilthey emphasizes: it is impossible to abstract from the fact that man is a conscious being, which means that when analyzing human activity, one cannot proceed from the same methodological principles that an astronomer proceeds from when observing the stars.

And from what principles and methods should the "sciences of the spirit" proceed in order to comprehend life? Dilthey believes that this is primarily method of understanding , i.e. direct comprehension of some spiritual wholeness. It is authentic, but irrational, intuitive. “In every understanding there is an irrational, just as life itself is irrational; it cannot be represented by any formulas of logical operations.

This is the penetration into the spiritual world of the author of the text, inextricably linked with the reconstruction of the cultural context of the creation of the latter. In the natural sciences, it is used explanation method - disclosure of the essence of the object under study, its laws on the way of ascent from the particular to the general. Dilthey contrasts the understanding of society with the knowledge of nature. “The facts relating to society, we can understand only from within, only on the basis of the perception of our own states ... With love and hatred, with all the play of our affects, we contemplate the historical world. Nature is silent for us, it is alien to us, it is external to us. Society is our world."

In relation to the culture of the past, understanding acts as a method of interpretation, which he called hermeneutics - the art of understanding the written manifestations of life. He sees hermeneutics as methodological basis any humanitarian knowledge. The philosopher distinguishes two types of understanding: understanding of one's own inner world, achieved through introspection (self-observation); understanding of someone else's world - by getting used to, empathy, empathy (empathy). Dilthey considered the ability to empathize as a condition for the possibility of understanding cultural and historical reality. The most "strong form" of comprehension of life, in his opinion, is poetry, for it "is somehow connected with the event experienced or understood." One of the ways to comprehend life is intuition. important methods historical science Dilthey counts biography and autobiography.

From thinking about life, in his opinion, "life experience" arises. Separate events, generated by the collision of our instincts and feelings in us with those around us and fate outside of us, are generalized in this experience into knowledge. As human nature always remains the same, so the basic features of life experience are something that is common to all. At the same time, Dilthey notes that scientific thinking can test its reasoning, can accurately formulate and justify its provisions. Another thing is our knowledge of life: it cannot be verified, and exact formulas are impossible here.

Dilthey understands social life exclusively as a spiritual life unfolding in the experiences of people. Dilthey states: “Since society consists of structured individuals, the same patterns of structure appear in it as in the individual ... The patterns of the individual soul take the form of patterns of social life.” Consequently, the structure of society is determined by the mental structure of the individual.

Dilthey believes that the flow of mental events is unpredictable. “We are not in a position to predict what will follow in mental development after the state already achieved.” “We do not know what we will contribute to the coming day. Historical development reveals exactly the same character.

The German philosopher is convinced that not in the world, but in man, philosophy must seek "the inner connection of its knowledge." The life lived by people is what, in his opinion, he wants to understand modern man. At the same time, firstly, one must strive to unite life relationships and the experience based on them "into one harmonious whole." Secondly, it is necessary to direct one's attention to presenting "the image of life itself full of contradictions" (vitality and regularity, reason and arbitrariness, clarity and mystery, etc.). Thirdly, proceed from the fact that the way of life "acts out of the changing data of life experience."

In connection with these circumstances, Dilthey emphasizes the important role of the idea (principle) of development for comprehending life, its manifestations and historical forms. The philosopher notes that the doctrine of development is necessarily connected with the knowledge of the relativity of any historical form life. In front of an all-encompassing gaze Earth and all the past, the absolute significance of any separate form of life disappears.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)- representative of the French version of the philosophy of life. Bergson received a professional mathematical education. In 1881 - 1883. he worked as a teacher of mathematics and mechanics in Angers. Then he was a lecturer at Ecole Normale, and from 1900 to 1914 he was a professor at the prestigious College de France. In 1914 Bergson was elected a member of the French Academy. In 1927 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Most notable works Bergson - "Experience on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" (1889), "Matter and Memory" (1898), "Creative Evolution" (1907), "Duration and Simultaneity" (1922), "Two Sources of Morality and Religion" (1932).

In the book "Creative Evolution" Bergson reveals the main task of his philosophy - “to supplement the theory of knowledge with the theory of life”.

Bergson recognizes the existence of "external reality", but it must be understood as "life", movement, "duration", connectedness. “That in a certain sense there are multiple objects, that a person differs from a person, a tree from a tree, a stone from a stone - this is indisputable, for each of these beings, each of these things has its own characteristic properties and obeys a certain law of development. But the isolation of a thing from its environment cannot be absolute; through insensitive transitions, one unites with another ... these objects do not have the exact boundaries that we attribute to them.

Matter and consciousness "dissolve" in the general "stream" of life. Such a position, Bergson believes, allows him to rise above materialism and idealism. “Things happen as if a wide stream of consciousness has penetrated into matter, equipped, like any consciousness, huge amount possibilities mixed with each other. He carried matter along the path of organization, but his own movement was thereby greatly retarded and to a very large extent fragmented. “Matter is burdened with geometry, and it, going down, decaying reality, has duration only due to its connection with what rises up. Life and consciousness are this ascent. Whoever once comprehends them, having mastered their movement, will understand how the rest of reality comes from them.

Bergson develops a development concept called "creative evolution". Opposing mechanism, Bergson understands evolution as "life". But life, in Bergson's understanding, is not biological life, but "duration", "life impulse". Time or duration is the essential characteristic of life. "Pure duration is the form that the succession of our states takes when our ego is actively working." “Duration presupposes, therefore, consciousness; and already by virtue of the fact that we attribute to things a continuous time, we put into their depth a certain share of consciousness. Thus, Bergson believes that time is unthinkable outside of consciousness and is a relationship between its states.

Bergson interprets evolution as a continuous process of qualitative change. The source of this change is a certain vital impulse, life. This impulse arose at the beginning of the world. The world as a whole is a kind of center, "from which, as from a huge bouquet, worlds are thrown out, if only this center does not stand out ... not for a thing, but for the continuous ejection of jets." In the spirit of idealism, Bergson writes that "the vital principle must be consciousness ...". "Life ... is consciousness let into matter." “Consciousness or superconsciousness is a rocket, the extinct remnants of which fall in the form of matter; consciousness is also that which is preserved from the rocket itself and, cutting through these remnants, ignites them into organisms. Matter is the moment when the “life impulse” stops.

Here is another quote: “All organized beings, from the humblest to the most sublime, from the first beginnings of life to our era, everywhere and at all times, do nothing but reveal a single impulse, reverse to the movement of matter and indivisible in itself. himself. All living beings stick together and all succumb to the same terrible pressure. The animal leans on the plant, man reins in the animals, and all mankind in space and time is one huge army, galloping beside each of us and behind us in a crushing attack, capable of overcoming any resistance and defeating many obstacles, maybe even death".

Bergson presents evolution as a bunch of stems. The first fork in wildlife is the separation of plants and animals. Animals, in turn, are divided into arthropods and vertebrates. In the former, superconsciousness takes the form of instinct; in the latter, it develops into intellect. Instinct is a form of adaptation of consciousness to the material conditions of its "stay". The instinct is most clearly expressed in insects. This is a kind of standard, "machine-like" coordination of the action of an animal and its object, which does not require training, memory, or self-awareness. So, no one taught a wasp to prick a caterpillar with a sting, in which she lays her eggs.

A person has a developed intellect. "The essential function of the intellect, as shaped by the evolution of life, is to illuminate our behavior, prepare our action on things, foresee phenomena favorable or unfavorable for a given situation." Unlike instinct, intelligence has creative potential. The superconscious mind uses the subject's brain as its container, its tool, just as an artist uses a canvas and paints to realize his idea, or a hermit crab uses an empty snail shell to cover his soft belly.

But intelligence is limited. The understanding of life is inaccessible to him, he is able to understand only what he calls matter, that is, inanimate reality. The intellect decomposes change into "unchanging moments". The intellect can only clearly conceive of the discontinuous and immovable. It separates phenomena in space and fixes in time. Typical products of the intellect are geometry and logic; they apply, according to Bergson, only to solids.

Thus neither instinct nor intellect can comprehend life, although both are its forms. "Life" eludes us when we try to know it by intellectual means. But there is a way to directly comprehend life - intuition. Intelligence and intuition are two properties of our consciousness. In the course of evolution, the intellectual capabilities of our consciousness have developed to the detriment of the intuitive ones.

What is intuitive knowledge and what are its advantages over intelligence? Bergson says that "intuition is a kind of intellectual sympathy, by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to merge with that which is unique and, therefore, inexpressible in it." Comparing intellect and intuition, he writes that these are “two profoundly different ways of knowing things. The first is that we are moving around the object; the second is that we enter into it. The first depends on the position from which we look and on the symbols with which we express ourselves. The second does not depend on the point of view, nor on any symbols. It can be said that knowledge of the first kind stops at the relative; knowledge of the second kind, in those cases where it is possible, tends to reach the absolute. "While the intellect interprets all things mechanically, intuition operates, so to speak, organically." Intuition is the comprehension of reality in its essence.

Intuition is a contemplation that does not depend on the interests of people, on practice. On the other hand, the intellect and science are connected with practice and therefore cannot achieve "disinterested", "pure" contemplation. As scientific knowledge serves practice, it is always one-sided. The intellect chooses what is needed and omits everything else. “Before philosophizing, one must live; and life demands that we put on eyecups, that we look neither to the right nor to the left, but directly in front of us in the direction in which we will need to go ... In the infinitely vast field of our possible knowledge, we have chosen everything that is useful for our actions on things in order to create from it the present knowledge: the rest we have neglected.

With numerous claims about the importance of intuition, Bergson, however, does not clearly describe what it is. First of all, intuition is characterized by the principle of "by contradiction". In order to know intuitively, it is not required to know anything, to undertake anything: only an effort of the will is required, directing the consciousness in defiance of all inclinations, habits, points of view. It is necessary to destroy all ties with practice, to look at things purely contemplatively - this is what it means to have intuition.

The carriers of intuition are, according to Bergson, people whose nature has forgotten to combine the ability to perceive with the ability to act, i.e. created the basic premise of non-utilitarian contemplation. These people have a mechanism that is older than the intellect. This is instinct. The ratio of intelligence and instinct, according to the teachings of Bergson, is rather complicated. Intellect is the knowledge of form, instinct is the knowledge of matter. There is no intellect in which there would be no trace of instinct, but there is no instinct without a glimpse of intellect. However, the intellect needs more instinct than instinct needs the intellect. The processing of matter for the manufacture of tools presupposes a high degree of organization of a living being. It was possible to rise to this height only on the wings of instinct. In its developed form, intelligence determines the life of people. Instinct is the vital activity of animals and, especially, insects. But in every intellect there are traces of instinct. This the trace of instinct in the intellect is intuition , i.e. instinct, transformed by the intellect into sympathy for the object of knowledge, which allows one to merge in an act of disinterested contemplation with the qualitative certainty of the latter.

Bergson says that intuition is strongest in art. The artist cognizes reality not from the outside, but from the inside, with the help of intuition. Philosophy must become like art. “Philosophy, as I understand it, approaches art rather than science. For too long it has been regarded as a science, hierarchically the most exalted. But science gives only an incomplete, or rather fragmentary, picture of reality; it captures it only indirectly with extremely artificial symbols. Art and philosophy, on the contrary, are united in intuition, which is their common basis. I will even say that philosophy is a genre, of which the various arts are types.

In the human social behavior Somewhere "behind" the mind, according to Bergson, there is a powerful force, a "virtual instinct" that oversees the mind. On the basis of this force, morality and religion arise, which is "omnipresent". Life, as it is embodied in man, is a struggle against the natural and, to a certain extent, its overcoming.

how animal world splits into the world of insects, whose communities are dominated by instinct, and the world of vertebrates, whose higher representatives are dominated by intellect, similarly human communities are split into "closed" and "open". The "closed" community strives for self-preservation and relies on violence and submission to authority. This type of society is characterized by static morality and religions that sharply oppose “us” and “them”. Modern humanity has split and is splitting into such communities, at enmity with each other. This split seems to be the natural state of mankind, a certain imperative of nature. But at all times there are people who proclaim the ideals of an “open” society, embracing all of humanity, forgetting about the division into “us” and “them”. These people are saints, mystics. They lay the foundations of dynamic morality and religion, the main principles of which are love for humanity, the rejection of artificial needs, the development of the "body" to the detriment of the "spirit". Their religious and moral insights are based on intuition, which can be called mystical. The progress of mankind, according to Bergson, is connected with the activities of these people, with the transition they are preparing from closed communities to an open society. Thus, the real content of world history is the struggle against the imperatives of nature.

Bergson's philosophy influenced not only many areas of philosophy in the 20th century. (French existentialism, personalism, phenomenology, etc.), but also on the art of the 20th century. To some extent, it was reflected in the works of M. Proust, F. Mauriac, E. Verhaern, P. Claudel, M. Maeterlinck, D. Joyce, W. Wulf, W. Faulkner, in the music of C. Debussy, in the painting of cubism etc.

Irrationalistic motives can be traced in the work Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). The German teacher of history and mathematics at one of the Munich gymnasiums became famous as the author of a cultural bestseller "The Decline of Europe" (T.1-2, 1918-1922), which in a short time went through more than thirty editions. The secret of the success of the book, saturated with a huge number of ideas and symbolic images related to the most diverse fields of knowledge from mathematics to religion, from physics to mythology, is explained primarily by the author’s lively artistic imagination, capable of combining thousands of disparate facts into an integral plastic picture.

Spengler's original concept is "life" as a fullness, a variety of experiences. Something primary, but in no way reducible to a monotonous biological existence. Life is a creative impulse into the future. She is not satisfied with any framework, limits and constantly wants to surpass herself. Life only partially and symbolically expresses itself in culture - in human beliefs, images, architectural structures, social institutions. Life is deeper and richer than culture. Like Nietzsche, Spengler called "life" "truth" freed from moral shells, reality, the freedom of the spirit, striving for unlimited expansion, the ability to take risks, to play.

Spengler's style is more of an artist's style than a scientist's. He doesn't give anywhere. exact definition meaning that he puts in the concept of culture. Instead, he uses a series of metaphors to characterize culture as organism to emphasize its integrity, then how personality to point out its individual originality, then how work of fiction to express the idea that it has a common idea and a single style.

The essence of culture in general and each individual, local culture is portrayed by him as a fundamentally unsolvable riddle. Culture for him is something that lies between life and death, opposing them and at the same time uniting them. “Life” as a source of energy, a continuously renewed instinctive impulse to action, an eternal “primal” principle with its vague, unconscious desire to realize oneself in the world, in a “spiritualized body” - this is a mysterious mystical force that prompts a person to create culture. But in cultural activities human life is deadened. The instinctive impulse to action turns into a reasonably calculated satisfaction of needs. The creative burning of the spirit dies down and freezes in the finished, motionless products of creativity. Instead of a “spiritualized body”, a lifeless, stiff mummy is formed - a dead heap of things processed by human labor.

Spengler identifies eight "great cultures": 1) Egyptian, 2) ancient, 3) Indian, 4) Babylonian, 5) Chinese, 6) Arabic, 7) Western and 8) Mexican. In his book, he focuses mainly on ancient, Western and Arab culture.

Soul of culture. From Spengler's point of view, the history of cultures is a majestic and tragic history of human attempts to overcome the chaos hostile to life, to overcome the resistance of matter to the spirit. Like a flower that brings its special beauty into the world, every culture carries its own special idea, its own special version of the struggle between life and death, between spirit and matter. This idea, this variant is the soul of culture. Just as every individual human person, so every human culture has its own soul. It seeks to express itself in the cultural activity of the people, and all its fruits are spiritualized by it. Culture is the body in which the soul is clothed.

Culture is born at the moment when “a great soul, a certain face from the abyss of the faceless, something limited and transient from the boundless and abiding” exfoliates and awakens to life from the “primordial state”. It flourishes on the soil of a certain landscape and seeks its self-fulfillment in its space. "Culture dies when its soul has realized the full sum of its possibilities in the form of peoples, languages, creeds, arts, states, sciences." As soon as this happens, writes Spengler, she suddenly becomes numb, her blood coagulates, her strength breaks down - she becomes a civilization and in the form of a civilization can, like a withered tree, bristle her rotten branches for centuries and millennia, until, finally, she returns again to her great soul. element.

Proto-symbols of culture. Each new soul culture awakens along with a new worldview - a symbolic expression ideal which she strives to bring into reality. The symbolism in which this ideal is expressed has a sensory-spatial character. It determines how people in a given culture perceive the world, how they want to see it, what it means to them. The world of culture is always a world correlated with a certain soul. It is based on prasymbol- a way of representing the "landscape" of culture in its spatial extent.

Spengler argues that the entire language of its forms, all its manifestations, can be deduced from the pra-symbol of culture. “Like a flower that brings its beauty into the world, every culture carries its own special idea. That is why there is a deep affinity between the political and mathematical structures of the same culture, between religious and technical views, between mathematics, music and plastic arts, between economic and cognitive forms. But the original symbol unrealizable and incomprehensible. It is not exhausted by any of its manifestations in culture. It cannot be known and expressed in words, because the forms of knowledge and language are themselves symbols derived from it. Nevertheless, Spengler considers it possible to indicate the images in which he appears to the researcher of culture.

Spengler believes that one can speak, on the one hand, of morphological affinity all the phenomena of one and the same culture that exist in its various fields and at different stages of its development, and on the other hand, about homological similarity between the phenomena of different cultures that occupy the same historical place in them.

A morphological affinity exists, for example, in Western culture between differential calculus and the dynastic principle of the Louis XIV French state, the spatial perspective of oil painting and the transcendence of space by means of railways and telephones, contrapuntal music and the economic system of credit. And homologically similar are, for example, ancient sculpture and Western instrumental music, Egyptian pyramids of the IV dynasty and Gothic cathedrals. Spengler calls the homological elements of different cultures "simultaneous" to emphasize that the time of their emergence and existence falls on the same period of history - only experienced by each culture in its own way. In this sense, in his opinion, the Ionic order in Greece and the baroque in the Western world, Islam in Arabic and Protestantism in Western culture, Greek arithmetic of finite numbers and Arabic algebra of indefinite numbers, ancient coinage and Italian double-entry bookkeeping are born at the same time. And in this sense, "contemporaries" are Pythagoras and Descartes, Euclid and Gauss, Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

Antique (Apollo) soul, having been born against the background of a rugged closed space of mountains, islands, peninsulas, chooses as its pra-symbol limited material body. Physicality, figurativeness, visual design are characteristic of the consciousness of the Greeks. For them, only bodies are real - visible, tangible, existing here and now. Empty, pure space, which does not contain bodies, is for him the same as nothing, non-existence. The Greeks did not seek to build gigantic structures like the Egyptian pyramids or the legendary Tower of Babel. Their buildings are small, observable, comparable in scale to the human body. The Greek soul cannot bear the sight of an open distance, a space not divided into separate observable bodies and devoid of definite, visible boundaries. This makes the Greeks swim without losing sight of the shores. Unlike the Egyptians or the Phoenicians, they are not drawn to long journeys. They do not build roads, they are afraid of the prospects of alleys running away into the distance. Their state-states are tiny compared to the possessions of the Egyptian pharaohs or the Chinese emperors. Homeland in their understanding is something that can be viewed from the fortress walls of your city. Beyond these limits - someone else's, hostile.

The distance of time attracted the Greeks just as little as the distance of space. Their existence is limited in the observable historical time as well as in the observable volume of space. Unlike the Egyptians and the Chinese, the Greeks have no interest in the past and show no concern for the future. If the Egyptians spent a lot of energy to preserve the memory of the dead, then the Greeks simply burned the bodies of the dead, and the memory of them was quickly dispelled. The Greeks did not keep an accurate count of time, were poorly oriented in the chronology of historical events, did not care about the preservation of documents, did not write either annals or memoirs. The Persians, after the destruction of Athens, threw the works of art into a landfill - and no one cared about them.

The pra-symbol of Western culture is infinity, "pure" boundless space. Born in the vast expanses of northern Europe, the soul of this culture is directed into the distance. She needs will, freedom, going beyond the visible horizon. All sorts of boundaries constrain her, she cannot stop at: what has been achieved. Hence - the thirst for travel that overwhelms Europeans, the search for new lands, new impressions, new areas of application of forces. Territorial conquests, Crusades, the creation of the global British Empire, Magellanic circumnavigation - all this testifies to the unrestrained craving for an ever greater expansion of the surrounding space. This thrust prompts Europeans to invent the telescope and microscope, to invent the steamboat and automobile, to build Gothic cathedrals aimed at the sky.

The desire for the infinite appears in Christian religion, which appeared in the Arab Middle East, but organically entered Western culture. The Christian God is infinite and eternal, he has infinite wisdom and infinite power. European science is built on the idea of ​​infinity. Such is Cartesian physics with its boundless ether and Newtonian classical mechanics with its picture of boundless empty world space in which an infinite number of atoms move. Such is the European mathematics of infinitesimals, infinite series, infinite sets. The idea of ​​infinity is also permeated with the grandiose, all-encompassing philosophical systems of Spinoza, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel and other classics of European philosophy.

The soul of European culture, dissatisfied with staying within the boundaries of what has been achieved, aimed at endless movement towards the unknown, is symbolically represented, according to Spengler, in Goethe's Faust. That's why he calls her Faustian soul.

Spengler briefly touches upon the question of Russian culture. Russia for him is a mysterious world in which, perhaps, the soul of another great culture is born. In his opinion, the pra-symbol of Russian culture is the endless plain. But he still does not find a "solid expression" in the creations of the Russian soul.

Civilization as a dying culture. The souls of cultures are not immortal. Having exhausted their creative powers, they die. History develops in cycles, in circles; these cycles - birth, flourishing and dying - go through every culture. Each culture is closed in itself and cannot transfer its achievements to another culture. “Every culture experiences the ages of the individual. Each has its own childhood, youth, manhood and old age. This fatal end of the inner life of the spirit corresponds to the equally fatal end of culture - its world. external manifestations. There are no immortal creations of culture. The last organ and the last violin will someday be broken. The highest achievements of Beethoven's melody will seem to our distant descendants from the coming world of another culture as some kind of idiotic croaking. Sooner than the canvases of Titian and Rembrandt have time to decay, those souls for whom they will be something more than colored patches will be transferred. Who can now understand the Greek lyric as the ancient Greeks understood it? Who can feel what she meant to them? Nobody understands, nobody feels, says Spengler. There is no single humanity, no single history, no development, no progress. There are only completely dissimilar, alien souls and the different cultures they create, each of which, having survived its heyday, fades and, in the end, enters into final stage his being - civilization. Thus, according to Spengler, civilization is nothing but a dying culture. This is its end, "the end without the right to appeal."

Each culture has its own civilization, that is, its own form of death. But there is also common features characterizing all civilizations. Since these features act as signs of the degeneration and death of culture, Spengler contrasts civilization and culture and speaks of the opposition between them.

"Culture and civilization is the living body of the soul and its mummy." Culture is becoming, and civilization is becoming. Culture creates diversity, it implies inequality, individual uniqueness and diversity of personalities. Civilization strives for equality, for unification and standard. Culture is elitist and aristocratic, civilization is democratic. Culture rises above the practical needs of people, it is aimed at spiritual ideals that do not have a utilitarian character. Civilization, on the contrary, is utilitarian, it stimulates people to activities aimed at achieving practically useful results. In a cultured person, the energy is turned inward, to the development of his spirit, in a civilized person - outward, to conquer environment. Culture is tied to the earth, to the landscape, the realm of civilization is the city, the cluster engineering structures. Culture is an expression of the soul of a “people fused with the earth”, civilization is a way of life of the urban population, cut off from the earth, coddled with comfort (“the blessings of civilization”), which has become a collection of slaves of the soulless technology created by them. Culture is national, civilization is international. Culture is connected with cult, myth, religion, civilization is atheistic.

Spengler argues that in the very essence of civilization lies the desire to spread to all of humanity, to turn the world into one huge city. Therefore, it inevitably breeds imperialism. Civilization in general is characterized by expansion and gigantism: it is characterized by gigantic empires, gigantic cities, gigantic industrial enterprises, gigantic machines and systems of machines. Dying art degenerates into mass spectacles, into an arena of sensations and scandals. Philosophy becomes useless. Science is turning into a servant of technology, economics, and politics. People's interests are focused on the problems of power, violence, money, satisfaction of material needs.

Pointing out that all the noted features of civilization characterize state of the art Western world, Spengler predicts his imminent and inevitable death:

“The death of the West ... presents nothing more and nothing less than a problem of civilization ... Civilization is a set of extremely external and extremely artificial states that people who have reached the last stages of development are capable of. Civilization is the end. It follows culture as what has become after becoming, as death after life, as rigor after development, as spiritual old age and a stone and petrifying world city after the dominance of the earth and the childhood of the soul…. She is the inevitable end; all cultures come to it with a deep inner need.

He compares the decline of Europe taking place before our eyes with the collapse of the Roman Empire and finds many similarities (homologically similar) in these "simultaneous" processes: here and there we see huge cities, colossal buildings, great powers, constitutions, transitions from constitutional forms of government to formless power of individuals, destructive world wars, imperialism, etc. He also notices similarities between the various “ways of spiritual extinction” of cultures in the era of civilization: if for the Indian soul this way is Buddhism (from the 6th century BC) , for ancient - the philosophy of Roman stoicism (from the 3rd century), for Arabic - Islam (from the 11th century), then the Western soul finds its deathbed in socialism (from the 19th century).

All these teachings are just various forms of nihilism, the collapse of spiritual ideals, the replacement of the religious attitude of the soul with an irreligious one. In the socialist doctrine, the call for discipline and self-restraint looks stoic, in the Buddhist one - neglect of momentary blessings. A socialist is a dying Faust obsessed with historical concern for the future "socialist nirvana", for which he is ready to sacrifice today's happiness. Socialism, like Buddhism and Stoicism, is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace; it is a system of the will to power and has a purely imperialistic goal: to give its adherents the right to achieve the common good, without hindrance overcoming the resistance of dissidents. However, the socialist idea is just a powerless illusion that is not able to stop the inexorably impending death of Faustian culture. Nothing can save the Western world, and its inhabitants can only accept it as it is. Spengler ironically remarks: “If, under the influence of this book, people of a new generation turn to technology instead of lyrics, to naval service instead of painting, to politics instead of criticism of knowledge, then ... they cannot wish for better.”

The philosophy of life was formed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany and France. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, O. Spengler, G. Simmel and many other philosophers belong to this direction.

We can say that Schopenhauer's philosophy of life is quite pessimistic. Schopenhauer wrote the book The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer said: "that everything in this life is ruled by the will."

The title of this work reflects the main ideas of Schopenhauer's teachings. The whole world, from his point of view, is the "will to live." The will to live is inherent in all living beings, including man, whose will to live is the most significant, because man is endowed with reason, knowledge. Each individual person has his own will to live - not the same for all people. All other people exist in his view as dependent on the boundless egoism of a person, as phenomena that are significant only from the point of view of his will to live, his interests. The human community is thus represented as a set of wills of individuals.

The great thinker believed that the existence of mankind and the mind are incompatible concepts. The philosopher did not believe in progress. He wrote that the whole life of a person is subject not to rational motives, but to the so-called will. Will - in short, this is the basic instinct that prompts a person to save life at any cost. Will is expressed in certain affects. Basically it is the need for power, love and so on. It should also be noted that the will is absolutely blind. It is not subject to the laws of logic.

Schopenhauer believed that as long as there is this will to live, which pushes a person to aimless and non-constructive actions, the whole existence is in fact meaningless and chaotic. The philosophy of Schopenhauer's life is that a person must understand the necessity of giving up the will. Only in this case his life will not be subordinated to instinct, and the individual will gain true freedom.

The philosopher believes that there are three main springs of human actions, and only through their excitation do all possible motives work. These "springs": - egoism, which wants its own good (it is unlimited); - anger that wants someone else's grief (comes to the most extreme cruelty); - compassion that wants someone else's good (comes to nobility and generosity).

The will to power is one of the varieties of volitional impulses of human behavior. Nietzsche considered the will to power to be the defining stimulus of activity and the main ability of a person. The basis of life, according to Nietzsche, is the will to power or the craving of all living things for self-affirmation, omnipotence, the desire to expand power. Throughout life, a person strives to achieve a maximum sense of power. Nietzsche speaks contemptuously of the common man and exalts the born "aristocrats of the spirit." Ordinary people are worthless, weak, half-hearted, soft-bodied, unable to create and rule. They are slaves by nature and can only obey. It is necessary to love not the weak and neighbor, but the strong. Will is not inherent in everyone, but in the elect. To the common man in Nietzsche, the superman is opposed - a creature of the highest biotype, not belonging to any race and grown by the elite of society.

"Superman" is a being of the highest biotype. He is absolutely free, is outside the generally accepted (Christian) moral norms, outside good and evil. His morality implies the art of commanding, breadth of will, truthfulness, fearlessness, hatred of cowardice and cowardice, confidence in the deceit of the common people, cruelty in overcoming the total lie of earthly existence. The "Superman" is neither a hero nor a great man. This is an absolutely new breed of people, which has not yet been in the world - the fruit of the development of all mankind, not some separate nation. The "weak" must perish and make way for a new generation of "superhumans".

Bergson's philosophy, unlike most systems of the past, is dualistic. The world for him is divided into two fundamentally different parts: on the one hand - life, on the other - matter, or rather, that inert "something" that the intellect considers as matter. The whole universe is a collision and conflict of two opposite movements: life, which strives upwards, and matter, which falls downwards. Life is the only great force, the only great impulse of life given once, at the beginning of the world; meeting the resistance of matter; struggling to make its way through matter; gradually learning how to use matter through organization. Space - a characteristic of matter - arises when the flow is cut; it is illusory indeed, useful to some extent in practice, but extremely misleading in theory. Time, on the other hand, is the essential characteristic of life or mind.

Philosophy has had a great influence on human life and society. Despite the fact that most of the great philosophers have long since died, their theories and moral and ethical laws are still alive.

Philosophical ideals are the building blocks of our modern life. Philosophy guides us in our search for the meaning of life. What is this life all about? Why are we here? Is this a test? Are we alone? Philosophers have always sought to find answers to these questions in the most logical way. It is unfortunate that today discussions of philosophical ideas are held either in the classroom at the university (not in the best way), or in private conversations.

The reality is that the media contribute to degradation. But I would like to see more people open-minded people who ask questions and refuse to be labeled "normal". It's time to stop the eruption of meaningless theses and "facts" from the news feeds. Let's meet 10 philosophers who can change lives.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant, philosopher from Germany, one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy. He was a great thinker who lived in the eighteenth century when the world was changing. One of Kant's memorable ideas was the "Kingdom of Purposes".

The realm of ends is a thought experiment, a central issue in Kant's moral philosophy. Kant introduced this concept in his work Fundamentals of the Metaphysics of Morality. The thought experiment proposes a world in which each person should be seen as an end in itself, and not as a means to other people's ends. Kant, in essence, believed that if a person is treated fairly, only good things will grow in him. His work mainly focuses on ethics, political theory and epistemology.

Plato

Probably one of the most famous philosophers of all time. Plato changed the way laws were written around the world. He lived about four hundred years BC. Considered an important figure in the development of philosophy, especially in the Western tradition. He founded the first university in the Western world - the Academy in Athens and did a great job in the field of science.

Many people associate Plato with several central doctrines expressed in his writings: the world as we know it is somehow faulty and full of errors, but there is another reality - perfect place, inhabited by so-called "forms" or "ideas" that are eternal, unchanging, and in some sense paradigmatic for the world we perceive. Among the most important of these abstract ideas are goodness, beauty, equality, greatness, similarity, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. And, according to Plato, it is very important to distinguish among everything that seems beautiful (good, great, unique, fair) what actually is.

Avicenna

The author of some of the greatest philosophical ideas in the early 1000s is Avicenna. He is one of the most influential philosophers of Persia. Avicenna was an Islamic scholar and most of his early work revolved around his study of the Qur'an. Avicenna tried to resolve some fundamental questions, including the origin of the cosmos, the role of God in human existence and the universe, and God's interaction with humans and other creatures he created. He wrote about logic, metaphysics and ethics, while his greatest contribution was an attempt to reconcile ancient Greek philosophy and God as the creator of all things.

In addition to philosophy, Avicenna is one of the greatest doctors of his time. He created the Book of Healing and the Canon of Medicine. Avicenna was the first to describe the five classical senses: taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell. He may have been the world's first psychologist, while people suffering from a mental disorder at that time were defined as being possessed by demons.

John Locke

Around the end of the seventeenth century, one of the greatest modern philosophers was born in England. John Locke is the author of some amazing ideas by which nations live, work and legislate. He worked all his life to form the political principles by which modern law and the rights of people around the world function. He presented to the world the idea that all people have the right to life, liberty, and property, and that no government should exercise too much power.

Zeno of China

Zeno of China was born in Cyprus in 334 BC. Zeno lived all his life in Cyprus, but he had a great influence on philosophers all over the world. Zeno was the founder of the philosophical school of Stoicism. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism placed an emphasis on goodness and peace of mind derived from a virtuous life in accordance with nature.

Epicurus

Epicurus was born into a small Greek family in 341 BC. Philosophical questions visited Epicurus from a young age. At 18, he moved to Athens, where he served in the army for two years before returning to study philosophy. Epicurus is known for his teachings on the moral code and reason, for his rational outlook on life.

For Epicurus, the goal of philosophy is to achieve a happy, peaceful life characterized by peace and freedom from fear ("ataraxia") and the absence of pain ("aponia"). A happy life according to Epicurus is a self-sufficient life among friends.

Epicurus said that pleasure and pain are only measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both the body and the soul, and, therefore, it does not need to be feared; the gods do not punish or reward people; The universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the movement and interaction of atoms moving in empty space.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosopher of the late nineteenth century, changed the world with his unconventional ideology. He began his career by studying Greek and Roman texts. Nietzsche wrote critical texts on religion, morality, modern culture, philosophy and science. He is well known for his ideas about God. He believed that God is dead and people should not dedicate their lives to a doctrine that does not allow them to have a broader view of life.

It is believed that Nietzsche became the inspiration for the Nazis, with his ideas of the superman and his inhumane postulates, but this information is simply presented in a false light. In Nietzsche's understanding, the idea of ​​the superman is the idea of ​​the victory of the creative principle over the destructive animal. According to Nietzsche, the only person to overcome is himself.

Confucius

Confucius was born around 550 BC and is probably one of the most quoted Chinese philosophers. The philosophy of Confucius was based on personal and state morality, justice and sincerity. The principles of Confucius were based on Chinese traditions and beliefs. He supported the ideas of the importance of the family, worship of ancestors, respect for elders. And the concept of self-discipline was one of the most important in his philosophy.

Rene Descartes

The end of the sixteenth century was full of great thinkers, but no one was as famous as René Descartes. He was a philosopher who refused to accept old ideas and therefore created his own.

Descartes adhered to one theory that distinguished him from others. Unlike those who came before him, he defended the existence of God. One of his reasons for believing in God was that he believed God was perfect. Since perfection presupposes existence, then God must exist. René Descartes was also considered a mathematical genius and a key figure in the scientific revolution.

Aristotle

Born in 384 BC, is one of the most famous philosophers of all time. He studied at the Academy of Plato in Athens, and became the author of ideas that give rise to reflection today. It is believed that he was one of the first in the study of logic, which contributed to his understanding of the world. He is well known for his writings on virtue, which apply to many aspects of human life today. His work mainly focuses on ethics, science, rhetoric, theology, medicine, literary theory, and political theory.

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