Statement of the problem of the essence (nature) of man. Humanity of the nature of a social person Humanity is the goal of human nature

Chapter IV. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

1. HUMAN NATURE IN ITS MANIFESTATIONS

After discussing the current position of man in a technological society, our next step is to consider the problem of what can be done to humanize a technological society. But before taking this step, we must ask ourselves what it means to be human, that is, what is the human element that we need to take into account as the main factor in the functioning of the social system.

This formulation of the question goes beyond what is called "psychology." Rather, it should be called the "science of man", a discipline dealing with the data of history, sociology, psychology, theology, mythology, physiology, economics and art, as far as they relate to the understanding of man. What I can do in this chapter is very limited by necessity. I have chosen for discussion those aspects that seem to me the most necessary in the context of this book, and taking into account who it is intended for.

Man has always easily succumbed to temptation - and still does - accepting a special shape being a person for his essence. As far as this is the case, the person defines his humanity in terms of the society with which he identifies himself. However, since there is a rule, there are exceptions. There were always people who looked beyond their own society; and if at one time they may have been called fools or criminals, then in the annals of human history they make up a list of great people who saw something that can be called universally human and that does not coincide with what a given society takes for human nature. There have always been people who are brave enough and imaginative enough to look beyond the boundaries of their own social experience.

Perhaps it would be useful to reproduce several definitions of a person, capable of capturing a specifically human in one word. Man was defined as Homo faber - making tools. Indeed, man produces tools, but our ancestors also produced tools even before they became people in the full sense of the word 1.

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1 See Lewis Mumford for a discussion of this in his book The Myth of the Machine.

Man has been defined as Homo sapiens, but in this definition it all depends on what is meant by sapiens. To use thought in order to find more suitable means for survival or ways to achieve what you want - animals also have this ability, and if this type of achievement is meant, then the difference between humans and animals turns out to be quantitative at best. If, however, we understand knowledge by sapiens, meaning a thought that tries to understand the core of phenomena, penetrating beyond the deceptive surface to the "truly authentic", a thought whose purpose is not to manipulate, but to comprehend, then Homo sapiens would really be the correct definition of a person ...

A person was defined as Homo ludens - a person playing 1, meaning by play an aimless activity that surpasses the momentary need for survival. Indeed, from the time of the creators of cave paintings up to this day, man indulged in the pleasure of aimless activity.

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1 Wed: Huizinga J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture; Bally G. Vom Ursprung und von den Grenzen der Freiheit: Eine Deutung des Spiels bei Tier und Mensch. Basel, 1945.

Two more definitions of a person could be added. One is that Homo negans is a person who can say no, although most people say yes when it is required for survival or success. Taking into account the statistics of human behavior, a person should be called a rather “assenting person”. But from the point of view of human potential, man differs from all animals in his ability to say "no", in his affirmation of truth, love, integrity, even at the cost of life.

Another definition of a person would be Homo esperans - a hopeful person. As I pointed out in the second chapter, hope is a basic requirement for being human. If a person gave up all hope, he entered the gates of hell - whether he knows about it or not - and left all humanity behind him.

Perhaps the most significant definition of the species characteristics of a person was given by Marx, who defined it as "free, conscious activity" 1. I will discuss the meaning of this understanding later.

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1 It is worth noting that Marx criticized the famous Aristotelian definition of man as a political animal and replaced it with an understanding of man as a social animal, and also attacked Franklin's definition of man as a tool-making animal, considering him a "characteristic of the Yankee world."

Probably, a few more similar definitions could be added to those already mentioned, but they all completely do not answer the question: what does it mean to be human? They emphasize only some of the elements of human existence, without trying to give a more complete and systematic answer.

Any attempt to give an answer will immediately encounter the objection that at best such an answer is nothing more than metaphysical speculation, perhaps even poetic, but nevertheless it is more an expression of subjective preference than an assertion of some definite established reality. The last words bring to mind a theoretical physicist who is capable of reasoning about his own ideas as if they were an objective reality, and at the same time denying the possibility of any final statement about the nature of matter. Indeed, now it is impossible to finally formulate what it means to be human; it is possible that this could never be done, even if human evolution had far surpassed the present moment in history, in which man has hardly already begun to exist as a man in the full sense of the word. But a skeptical attitude towards the possibility of giving a final formulation of human nature does not mean that it is generally impossible to give definitions that are scientific in nature, that is, those in which conclusions are drawn on factual material and which are correct not only despite the fact that the reason for looking for an answer was desire a happier life, but precisely because, as Whitehead stated, “the function of Reason is to promote the art of living” 1.

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1 The Function of Reason. Boston, 1958. P. 4.

What knowledge can we draw to answer the question of what it means to be human? It makes no sense to look for an answer in the direction from which such answers are most often extracted: a person is good or bad, he loves or destroys, gullible or independent, etc. Obviously, a person can be all this, just like having an ear for music or not. him, to be susceptible to painting or color blind, to be a saint or a swindler. All these and many other qualities are varied possibilities being human. Indeed, they are all in each of us. To fully realize oneself as a human being means to realize that, as Terence said, “Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto” (I am a human being, and nothing human is alien to me); that everyone carries in himself all the human content, he is a saint, as well as a criminal. As Goethe put it, there is no crime that no one can imagine himself to be the author of. All these manifestations of human nature do not answer the question of what it is to be human. They only answer the question how different we can be as human beings. If we want to know what it means to be human, we need to be prepared to look for the answer not in the area of ​​diverse human possibilities, but in the sphere of the very conditions of human existence, from which all these possibilities arise as alternatives. These conditions can be grasped not with the help of metaphysical speculation, but by using data from anthropology, history, child psychology, individual and social psychopathology.

2. CONDITIONS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

What are these conditions? Essentially, there are two of them, and they are interconnected. First, the decrease in dependence on instincts as the evolution of animals progresses, reaching the lowest point in humans, in which the determination by instincts approaches zero.

Secondly, the colossal increase in the size and complexity of the brain compared to body weight, which took place in the second half of the Pleistocene. The enlarged cerebral cortex is the basis of consciousness, imagination, and all those adaptations, such as speech and the creation of symbols, that characterize human existence.

Lacking the instincts with which an animal is equipped, man is not as well adapted for flight or attack as animals. It lacks the infallible "knowledge" that salmon have on their way back to the river to spawn, or with which birds determine how to fly south in winter and how to return in summer. His decisions do not impose on him instinct. He forced to accept them myself. He is faced with the need to choose, and in every decision he makes there is a risk of failure. Insecurity is the price a person pays for consciousness. He is able to tolerate insecurity by realizing and accepting the position the person is in and hoping that he will not fail, albeit with no guarantee of success. He has no confidence; the only reliable prediction he can make is, "I will die."

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and at the same time surpassing it. Instead of instincts, he has to look for principles by which he will act and make decisions. He needs to have an orientation system that allows him to form a logical picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He is forced to fight not only against such dangers as death, hunger, infliction of pain, but also against another danger, specifically human: mental illness. In other words, he has to defend himself not only from the danger of losing his life, but also from the danger of losing his mind. A human being born in the conditions described here would really go crazy if it did not find a reference system that allows him in one form or another to feel at home in the world and avoid the feeling of complete helplessness, disorientation and disconnection from the sources. There are many ways in which a person can find a solution to the problem of how to stay alive and maintain mental health. Some are better, others are worse. The word "better" means a path that contributes to an increase in strength, clarity, joy, independence, and the word "worse" means the opposite. But finding some viable solution is more important than finding a solution. better.

The thoughts expressed raise the issue of human compliance. Some anthropologists and other researchers of man have come to believe that man is infinitely malleable. At first glance it seems that this is so, just as he can eat either meat, or vegetables, or both; he can be both a slave and a free one; live in need or in abundance; live in a society that values ​​love, or in one where destructiveness is valued. Indeed, a person can do almost everything, or, perhaps, it is better to say, the social order can do almost everything with a person. The word "almost" is important here. Even if the social order can do everything with a person: starve him to death, torture him, imprison him or feed him - this cannot be done without certain consequences arising from the very conditions of human existence. Completely deprived of all incentives and pleasures, a person will be unable to engage in work, especially qualified 1. When he is not completely deprived of them, then if he is turned into a slave, he will have a tendency to rebel; if his life is too boring, he will have a tendency to rage; if turned into a car, he is likely to lose all creativity. In this respect, man is no different from animals or from inanimate matter. You can put some animals in the zoo, but they will not produce offspring; others will go berserk, although at large they did not differ in fury 2. You can heat the water to a certain temperature and it will turn into steam; or refrigerate it to a certain temperature and it will harden. But you cannot produce steam by lowering the temperature. The story of a person shows with precision what you can do with a person and at the same time what you you can not. If man were infinitely malleable, there would be no revolutions; there would be no change, because the culture would have succeeded in producing a person who obeyed its patterns without resistance. But being only relatively compliant, man has always protested against conditions that made the imbalance between social order and human needs too harsh or even intolerable. The attempt to reduce this imbalance, the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution to problems, is at the very core of human dynamism in history. Man protested not only because of material hardships; specifically human needs, which we will discuss later, are equally powerful drivers of revolution and dynamics of change.

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1 Recent experiments in desensitization indicate that extreme forms of lack of stimulus to which a person is able to respond can trigger symptoms of severe mental illness.

2 A similar fact is found in psychotic patients living on farms or in other settings other than prison. Unless they were violently used, they weren't all that violent. Thereby, it is proved that the apparent basis for the previous treatment of them as prisoners - their alleged propensity to rampage - led to precisely the result that such treatment was supposed to reduce or control.

3. THE NEED FOR A SYSTEM OF ORIENTATION AND ATTACHMENT

Various answers are possible to the question raised by human existence. They center around two problems: one is the need for an orientation system and the other is the need to have some kind of attachment.

What are the possible answers to the need for an orientation system? To this day, man has found the only overarching response, also seen among animals, is to submit to a strong leader who is supposed to know what is best for groups, who plans and commands, and who promises everyone that by following him, he does the best. in the best interest of all. To achieve loyalty to the leader, or, in other words, to give the individual enough faith in the leader, it is assumed that the leader is superior to any of the subordinates in his qualities. He is considered omnipotent, omniscient, sacred; he is either a god himself, or a divine substitute, or a supreme priest who owns the secrets of the cosmos and performs the rituals necessary to maintain its integrity. For reliability, leaders usually used promises and threats and with their help deftly manipulated their subordinates. But that's not all. Until a person reached a sufficiently high level of his evolution, he needed a leader and he simply wanted to believe fantastic stories that showed the legitimacy of a king, God, father, monarch, priest, etc. The need for a leader still exists in the most enlightened societies of our day. Even in countries such as the United States or the Soviet Union, decisions regarding the life and death of everyone are left to the discretion of a small group of leaders, or even one person, formally acting according to the law given to him by the constitution - regardless of what it is called " democratic "or" socialist ". Desiring security, people have come to love their own addiction, especially if its burden is eased by the relative comforts of material life and an ideology that calls brainwashing “education” and obedience “freedom.”

There is no need to look for the roots of this humility in the phenomena of domination-submission among animals. Indeed, in a significant number of animals it does not take on such extreme forms, and it is not as widespread as in humans. The conditions of human existence in themselves would require submission, even if we completely ignored our animal past. However, there is one crucial difference here. A person does not have to be a lamb. Indeed, since man is not an animal, he is interested in correlating with reality and being aware of it, touching the ground with his feet, as in the Greek legend of Antaeus; the fuller the human contact with reality, the stronger it is. While he is just a lamb and his reality is nothing but a fiction created by society to make it more convenient to manipulate people and things, as a person he is weak. Any change in the social model threatens him with a loss of confidence or even madness, because the whole circle of his relationship with reality is mediated by fiction, which he passes off as true reality. The higher his ability to comprehend reality on his own, and not only in the form of the sum of information that society supplies him, the more confident he feels, since the less his dependence on consent with society, and therefore, the less dangerous social changes for him. Man as a man has an inherent tendency to expand his knowledge of reality, and therefore, to come closer to the truth. We do not deal here with the metaphysical concept of truth, limiting ourselves only to the idea of ​​an increasing approach to it, which implies a decrease in fiction and delusion. Compared to the importance of the question of increasing or decreasing the degree of comprehension of reality, the question of the existence of ultimate truth turns out to be completely abstract and irrelevant. An ever-increasing degree of awareness is nothing more than a process of awakening, when the eyes open and a person sees what is in front of him. Awareness means getting rid of illusion, and as far as it is achieved, it represents liberation.

While there is a tragic discrepancy between intellect and emotion in industrial society today, it cannot be denied that the history of man is a history of increasing awareness. Moreover, awareness concerns both nature outside of man and his own nature. Although man still wears blinders on his eyes, his critical mind in many ways has made a huge number of discoveries both about the nature of the universe and about the nature of man. A person is still at the very beginning of this process of discoveries, and the key question is whether the destructive force that modern knowledge has given him will allow him to continue expanding this knowledge to unimaginable limits today, or whether he will destroy himself before he can create a more complete picture of reality on the current basis.

For such a development to take place, one condition is necessary: ​​social contradictions and irrationality, which throughout most of human history have implanted in a person a "false consciousness" in order to justify domination and submission, respectively, must disappear or, at least, their number must be reduced to such an extent that an apology for the existing social order does not paralyze a person's ability to think critically. Of course, the point is not what is primary, what is secondary. Awareness of the existing reality and the possibilities of its improvement helps to change reality, and each improvement of reality helps to clarify the thought. Today, when scientific reasoning has reached its pinnacle, the transformation of a society burdened by the inertia of previous circumstances into a healthy society could allow the average person to use his mind with the objectivity that scientists are accustomed to. The point here is not primarily the superiority of the intellect, but the disappearance of irrationality from public life - irrationality, which inevitably leads to confusion in the minds.

A person has not only a mind and a need for an orientation system that allows him to find some meaning in the world around him and equip it; he also has a soul and a body that need emotional attachment to the world - to man and to nature. As I have already mentioned, the animal is given connections with the world, mediated by instincts. A person who neglected self-awareness and the ability to yearn would be a helpless speck of dust blown by the wind if he did not find emotional attachments that satisfy his need for correlation and unity with the world outside of his personality. But in contrast to the animal, he has several alternative ways to establish such connections. As with the mind, some possibilities are better than others; but what a person especially needs to maintain his mental health is any attachment with which he will feel confident. Those who do not have such attachment are by definition unhealthy, since they are incapable of any emotional connection with their loved ones.

The simplest and most common form of human relatedness is his “primary bond” with where he comes from: bonds by blood, by common land, by kind, by mother and father - or in more complex societies, the connection with his people, religion, class. These bonds are not inherently sexual in nature, they fulfill the longing desire of a person who has not yet matured to the point of becoming himself, overcoming an intolerable sense of separation. Solving the problem of human separateness by extending what I have called the "primary bond" - natural and necessary for the child in his relationship with his mother - seems obvious when we study the primitive cults of worship of land, lakes, mountains or animals, often accompanied by symbolic identification of the individual with these animals (totem animals). We find something similar in matriarchal religions, in which the Great Mother and the goddesses of fertility and the earth are worshiped 1. Apparently, in patriarchal religions, in which the Great Father, God, king, tribal leader, law or state are the objects of worship, an attempt is made to overcome the primary ties with mother and earth. But although the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cult is progressive for society, both forms have in common that a person acquires his emotional attachments to a higher authority, to which he blindly obeys. Remaining connected with nature, mother or father, a person really manages to feel at home in the world, but he pays an exorbitant price for this reliability with his subordination, dependence, inability to fully develop his mind and ability to love. He remains a child when he ought to be an adult 2.

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1 Wed the works of Bachofen and Briffaut on matriarchal societies.

2 Today, orthodox psychoanalysis explains many cases of the "fixation of the individual to the mother" as a result of unbreakable sexual attachment to the mother. This explanation ignores the fact that attachment to the mother is only one possible response to the hardships of human existence. A dependent individual of the 20th century living in a culture, social aspects expected of him to show independence, is confused and often neurotic because society does not provide him with social and religious models for satisfying his need for independence, as was the case in more primitive societies. Fixation on the mother is a personal expression of one of the answers to the problem of human existence, presented in some cultures in a religious form. Anyway, but this is still an answer, although it contradicts the integral development of the individual.

The primitive forms of both incestuous relationships with mother, earth, race, etc., and complacent or embittered ecstasy can disappear only if a person finds a better way to feel at home in the world, when not only his intellect, but also the ability to experience attachment without submission, intimacy without repression, the ability to feel at home but not in confinement. On a societal scale, this new vision has been emerging since the middle of the second millennium BC. NS. to the middle of the first millennium - in one of the most remarkable periods in human history. They stopped looking for a solution to the problem of human existence in a return to nature, in the blind obedience of the father's personality, having discovered that a person can feel at home in the world and overcome the feeling of frightening loneliness through the achievement of the full development of his human powers, his ability to love, use reason, create beauty and enjoy it, share your humanity with all your neighbors. This new vision was proclaimed by Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity.

The new bond that allows a person to feel at one with all people is fundamentally different from the submissive attachment to father and mother; it is a harmonious bond of brotherhood in which solidarity and human ties are neither emotionally nor intellectually clouded by restrictions on freedom. That is why brotherhood is not a matter of subjective preference, only it is capable of satisfying two human needs: to be closely connected and at the same time to be free, to be part of the whole and to be independent. This method of problem solving has been experienced by many individuals and groups, both religious and secular, who have been and have been able to develop bonds of solidarity along with the unrestricted development of individuality and independence.

4. THE NEED TO SURVIVE - AND NOT JUST SURVIVE

To fully understand the human predicament and the choices that humans face, I need to discuss another type of fundamental conflict inherent in human existence. Since man has a body and bodily needs, basically the same as an animal, he also has an inherent desire for physical survival, although the methods he uses are not of an instinctive, reflexive nature, more common in animals. The human body makes him strive for survival, regardless of the circumstances, whether he is happy or unhappy, a slave or free. As a consequence, a person must work or make others work for himself. In past history, man spent most of his time getting food. Here I am using the words "getting food" in the broadest sense. In the case of an animal, this basically means getting food in such quantity and quality as its instincts tell it. Man is much more flexible in his choice of food; but even more important is that, once starting to move along the path of civilization, a person works not only to acquire food, but also to make clothes, build a dwelling, and in more developed cultures, to produce many things that are not directly related to physical survival, but manifested themselves as real needs, constituting the material basis of life, which allows culture to develop.

If man were content to spend his life in providing for the process of life, there would be no problem. Although a person does not have the instinct characteristic of an ant, nevertheless, an ant existence would become quite bearable for him. However, such are the characteristics of a person that he will not be satisfied with the existence of an ant, that in addition to the field of biological or material survival, there is a sphere characteristic of a person, which can be called surpassing the needs of simple survival, or nadutilitarian.

What does this mean? Precisely because a person has consciousness and imagination, because he is potentially free, he is internally not disposed to be, as Einstein once said, “ dice thrown out of the vessel ”. He wants to know not only what is necessary for survival; he also wants to understand what human life itself is. He is the only case in which life is aware of itself. He wants to use those abilities that he has developed in the course of the historical process and which can serve much more than just ensure the process of biological survival. Hunger and sex as purely physiological phenomena belong to the sphere of survival. (Freud's psychological system suffers from the same serious error as the mechanistic materialism of his time; it was this that led him to create psychology on the basis of motives that serve to survive.) But man has passions that are specifically human and surpass the function of survival.

No one expressed this more clearly than Marx: "Passion is the essential power of man, vigorously striving for its object." In this statement, passion is seen as a concept that expresses attitude and relatedness. The dynamism of human nature, how human it is, is initially rooted rather in the needs of man to realize their abilities in relation to the world, rather than in the need to use the world as a means to satisfy the physiologically necessary. This means that since I have eyes, there is a need to see, because there are ears, there is a need to hear; because there is a mind, there is a need to think; because there is a soul, there is a need to feel. In short, since I am a human being, I need a human being and the world. What is meant by "human faculties" passionate about the world makes it clear: "Each of its human relations to the world— sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, thinking, contemplation, sensation, desire, activity, love, in a word, all the organs of his individuality ... these are— actualization of human reality ... In practice, I can relate to a thing humanly only when the thing is humanly related to a person ”2.

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1 Marx K. Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 // Marx K., Engels F. Op. Vol. 42, p. 164.

2 Marx K., Engels F. Op. T. 42.S. 120, 121.

Human motives, how much higher than utilitarian ones, are an expression of a fundamental, specifically human need: the need to relate to another person and nature and to assert oneself in this correlation.

Both forms of human existence - obtaining food for survival in a narrow or broader sense and free, spontaneous activity to realize human abilities and search for meaning outside the boundaries of utilitarian work - are inherent in human existence. Each society and each person has its own special rhythm in which both forms of life support manifest themselves. What is really important is the power with which each of them manifests itself and which dominates over which.

Action and thought have the dual nature of this opposition. Survival activity is what is commonly called labor. Activity at a level that surpasses survival is what is called play, or all those activities that are associated with a cult, ritual, art. Thought also manifests itself in two forms: one serves the function of survival, the other - the function of knowledge in the sense of understanding, capturing. For a correct understanding of consciousness and the so-called unconscious, it is very important to distinguish between thought aimed at survival and thought that transcends the goal of survival. Our conscious thought represents a type of thinking associated with language, which is carried out in categories imprinted under the influence of society in our thinking from early childhood 1. Our consciousness is mainly awareness of such phenomena that the social filter, consisting of language, logic and taboo, allows us to bring to awareness. Those phenomena that fail to pass through the social filter remain at the level of the unconscious, or, more precisely, we are not aware of everything that cannot penetrate our consciousness, because the social filter does not allow it to pass through. This is why consciousness is determined by the structure of society. However, this statement is only descriptive. Since a person has to work in a given society, his need for survival prompts him to accept the conceptual schemes of this society, and therefore, to supplant everything that he would realize if other schemes were imprinted in his mind. This is not the place for examples to support this hypothesis, but if the reader is studying other cultures, it will not be difficult for him to find such examples himself. The categories in which the industrial age thinks are quantity, abstraction, comparison, profit and loss, efficiency and inefficiency. A member of today's consumerist society, for example, does not need to supplant sexual desires, since the standards of industrial society do not prohibit sex. The middle class of the 19th century, busy with the accumulation of capital and investing rather than consuming it, was forced to supplant sexual desires because they did not fit into the acquisitive, hoarding mindset of his society or, more precisely, the middle classes. If we are transported mentally into the Middle Ages, or into Greek society, or into cultures such as the Pueblo Indians, we can easily find that they were fully aware of which aspects of life their social filter allowed to penetrate into consciousness, and which did not.

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1 Benjamin Woerf's work showed close connection between language and differences in ways of thinking and experiencing. Wed an important contribution to this problem made by Ernst Schachtel in the book "Metamorphosis" and in previous works.

The most striking case when a person does not need to accept the categories of his society is when he is sleeping. Sleep is a state of being in which a person is free from the need to worry about survival. While he is awake, he is greatly limited by his survival function; while he sleeps, he is a free man. As a result, his thinking does not obey the mental categories of his society and displays that kind of creativity that we find in dreams. In dreams, a person creates symbols and penetrates the nature of life and his own personality, which he is not capable of, while he is a creature engaged in obtaining food and ensuring safety. Often, however, the lack of contact with social reality can cause the appearance of archaic, primitive illness-causing experiences and thoughts, but even they are more authentic and characteristic of him than the thought patterns of his society. In dreams, the individual overcomes the tight boundaries of his society and becomes human in the full sense of the word. This is why the interpretation of dreams, discovered by Freud, paved the way for an understanding of the uncensored humanity in each of us, although he was looking mainly for the repressed sexual instinct. (Sometimes children who have not yet received sufficient instruction in the learning process and psychotics, who have cut off all relations with the public world, demonstrate such insights and creative artistic abilities that adapted adults can no longer find again.)

But a dream is only a special case of a person's life, not limited by the problem of survival. Their main manifestations are rituals, symbols, painting, poetry, drama, music. Our utilitarian thinking quite logically tried to interpret all these phenomena as serving the function of survival (vulgarized Marxism sometimes, in essence, although not in form, entered into an alliance with this type of materialism). Deeper researchers, such as Lews Mumford and others, have emphasized that both cave paintings in France and ornaments of primitive ceramics and more advanced art forms do not have a utilitarian purpose. One could say that their function is to help the survival of the human spirit, not the body.

This is where the connection between beauty and true. Beauty is not opposed "Ugly" a "Fake"; it is a sensual expression of suchness of a thing or person. Reasoning in terms of Zen Buddhist thinking, the creation of beauty is preceded by a state of mind in which a person empties himself in order to be filled with the depicted to such an extent that he becomes it. "Beautiful" and "ugly" are just conventional categories that vary from culture to culture. A good example of our inability to comprehend beauty is the tendency common man to refer to "sunset" as an example of beauty, as if rain or fog are not as beautiful, although at times less pleasant to the body.

All great art, by its very nature, is in conflict with the society with which it coexists. It expresses the truth of existence, regardless of whether this truth serves the purposes of the survival of a given society or interferes with them. All great art is revolutionary because it comes into contact with the true essence of man and calls into question the authenticity of the diverse and fast-flowing forms of human society. Even if an artist is a political reactionary, he is more revolutionary - if he is a great artist - than representatives of "socialist realism" who only mirror the specific form of their society with its contradictions.

It is surprising that art has not been banned throughout history by either the authorities that were or those that are. There are probably several reasons for this. One is that without art, a person is depleted and may even become unfit for the implementation of the practical goals of his society. The other is that, thanks to his peculiarities and his own perfection, the great artist was an "outsider", which means that while he stimulated life by portraying it, he was not dangerous, because he did not transfer his art to the political plane. In addition, usually art was available only to the educated and politically least dangerous classes in society. Throughout history, artists have been court jesters. They were allowed to tell the truth because they presented it in a specific, socially limited artistic form.

The industrial society of our time is proud that millions of people have the opportunity and truly enjoy the opportunity to listen to excellent music both live and on record, admire works of art in many museums in the country, read masterpieces of literature from Plato to Russell in easily accessible, inexpensive publications ... There is no doubt that the encounter with art and literature truly affects only a minority. But for the overwhelming majority, “culture” is another commodity and is as much a symbol of social status as seeing “proper” pictures, knowing “proper” music, reading good books that are recommended in college and therefore useful for moving up the social ladder. The best works of art have been turned into consumer goods, and this has been achieved in an alienated way. Proof of this is the fact that most people who attend concerts, listen to classical music, buy cheap Plato editions, tasteless, vulgar TV programs do not cause disgust. If their experience of art were genuine, they would turn off their televisions when presented with a far from art banal "drama."

However, the human commitment to what is dramatic, what touches the foundations of human experience, has not yet died. Although for the most part the drama offered in theaters and on screen is either a non-art commodity or is consumed in an alienated way, contemporary “drama” is primitive and crude when genuine.

Today's commitment to drama finds its most sincere expression in the fact that most people are very attracted to both real and embellished accidents, crime and violence. A car accident or fire will draw crowds of people watching with great enthusiasm. Why do they do this? Simply because the primordial confrontation between life and death breaks through the surface of everyday experience and enchants people hungry for drama. For the same reason, the newspaper has the best coverage of crime and violence. The fact is that, although the Greek drama or Rembrandt's paintings seem to be highly revered, in reality they turn out to be supplanted by crimes, murders, violence, which are either directly shown on TV or described in the newspapers.

5. "HUMAN EXPERIENCES"

The man of the modern industrial society has experienced intellectual development, the end of which is not yet in sight. At the same time, he tends to emphasize those sensations and sensory experiences that unite him with animals: sexual desires, aggressiveness, fear, hunger and thirst. The crucial question is: Are there emotional experiences that are specifically human and not related to what we know is rooted in the lower brain? It is often argued that the colossal development of neoplasms of the cerebral cortex made it possible for a person to achieve an ever-increasing intellectual ability, but that his lower parts of the brain are unlikely to differ from his ancestors - monkeys, and, therefore, emotionally speaking, he did not advance in his development and the most he is capable of is to fight his "drives" by repression or control 1.

I dare to assert that there are specifically human experiences, not intellectual in nature, but not identical to those sensory experiences, which are generally similar to the experiences of animals. Not being competent in the field of neurophysiology, I can only make a guess 2 that the basis of these specifically human feelings is a special relationship between large neoplasms of the cerebral cortex and its old parts. There is reason to conclude that specifically human emotional experiences such as love, tenderness, empathy, and all non-survival affects are based on interactions between new and old brain regions; therefore, man differs from an animal not only in intelligence, but also in new emotional qualities arising from the relationship between the cerebral cortex and the basis of animal emotionality. The student of human nature can empirically observe these specifically human affects, and is unlikely to be discouraged by the fact that neurophysiology has not yet revealed the neurophysiological basis of this part of the experience. As in many other fundamental problems of human nature, the human scientist cannot neglect his own observations simply because neurophysiology has not yet given the green light. Each science, be it neurophysiology or psychology, has its own method, and each will, by necessity, consider only those problems that are available to it at the moment of its scientific development. It is up to the psychologist to challenge the neurophysiologist, prompting the latter to confirm or refute his findings, just as it is his duty to comprehend the conclusions of neurophysiology and either be inspired by them or doubt them. Both sciences - psychology and neurophysiology - are young and are still at the very beginning of their journey. They must develop relatively independently and at the same time maintain close contact with each other, mutually challenging and stimulating each other 3.

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1 This point of view is taken, for example, by such a serious biologist as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who, starting with another discipline, in many other respects comes to conclusions similar to those expressed in this book.

2 I am very grateful to Dr. Raul Hernandez Peon (Mexico) and Dr. Manfred Klinees (Rockland Hospital, New York) for thought-provoking personal interactions.

3 It is not out of place to note that, as far as “drives” working for survival are concerned, the idea of ​​creating a computer that reproduces all this side of sensory sensations does not sound so implausible, however, as far as specifically human sensibility that does not serve the purposes of survival is concerned, it seems it is difficult to imagine that it would be possible to design a computer analogous to non-survival functions. Probably, "humanized experiences" could be defined through negation, as something that cannot be duplicated on a machine.

In discussing specifically human experiences, which I will later call "humanized experiences," we might best begin by looking at "greed." Greed is a common characteristic of desires that drive a person in the name of achieving a certain goal. If the feeling is not greedy, the person is not excited by it, he is not pliant enough, on the contrary, he is free and active.

Greed can be motivated in two ways: 1) a violation of the physiological balance, giving rise to greed for food, drink, etc. Once the physiological need is satisfied, greed ceases to act, unless the imbalance becomes chronic; 2) violation psychological balance, especially by the presence of a feeling of increasing anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, lack of integrity, etc., softened by the satisfaction of desires such as food, sex, power, fame, property, etc. This type of greed is basically insatiable until it stops or is significantly anxiety will decrease, etc. The first type of greed is a reaction to circumstances; the second is inherent in the structure of character.

The greedy feeling is supremely selfish. Whether it is hunger, lust, or sexual lust, the greedy person wants something exclusively for himself, and what he achieves to satisfy his desire is just a means to achieve his own ends. When we talk about hunger and thirst, this goes without saying, but what was said also applies to the case when we talk about sexual arousal in its greedy form, in which the other person becomes in the first place object. There is not much egocentricity in a non-greedy feeling. The experience is not required to keep someone's life, ease anxiety, satisfy or strengthen someone's ego; it is not meant to relieve intense tension; it begins just where the need for a sense of survival or comfort ends. Experiencing a non-greedy feeling, a person can allow himself to go beyond his own limits; she is not forced to hold back neither what she has nor what she wants to have; she is open and responsive.

The sexual experience can be just sensually pleasing without deep love, but also without a noticeable degree of greed. Sexual arousal is physiologically stimulated and may or may not lead to intimate human relationships. The opposite kind of sexual desire is characterized by the reverse sequence, that is, when love generates sexual desire. More precisely, it means that a man and a woman can experience a deep sense of love for each other, expressed in caring, knowledge, intimacy, responsibility, and that this deep human experience awakens the desire for physical union. Obviously, the second type of sexual desire will be more common among people over 25 years old, although it is not at all necessary, and that this is the basis for the constant renewal of sexual desire in long-term monogamous human relations... If this type of sexual arousal is absent, naturally, purely physiological arousal will induce a person to change and new sexual experiences, with the exception of cases of sexual deviations that can bind two people for life due to the individual nature of their deviations. Both types of sexual arousal are fundamentally different from greed, which is predominantly motivated by anxiety or narcissism.

Despite the fact that it is not easy to distinguish greedy sexuality from "free" sexuality, there is still a difference between the two. An entire volume could be devoted to him, in which sexual relations would be described in the same detail as in Kinsey and Masters, but in which it would be possible to surpass the narrowness of their position of outside observers. However, I don’t think we need to wait for this volume to be written. Everyone who has realized and felt this difference can observe different types of arousal in himself, and it can be assumed that people who experimented more in the sexual sphere than, happened, representatives of the middle class of the Victorian era, will receive rich material for such observations. I say: you can suppose that they will have it, because, unfortunately, the growth of experimentation in the sexual field has not been accompanied enough by the ability to recognize qualitative differences in sexual experience, although I am sure there are a significant number of people who, when thinking about these objects, are able to authenticate differences.

We can now move on to discuss some of the other "humanized experiences" without pretending that the following description will be exhaustive. Tenderness akin to non-greedy sexual desire, but different from it. Freud, whose entire psychology deals exclusively with "drives", inevitably had to explain tenderness as a result of sexual attraction, as sexual lust with the prohibition of a goal. His theory inevitably led to such a definition, but observations rather show that tenderness is not at all a phenomenon that can be explained by sexual lust for a forbidden purpose. It is a sui generis experience. Its first characteristic is that it is free from greed. Experiencing tenderness, a person does not want anything from another person, not even reciprocity. She has no special purpose, not even one that is present in the relatively non-greedy form of sexuality, namely the ultimate physical climax. It is not limited by either gender or age. It is most difficult to express in words, except with the help of poetry. It is most vividly revealed in how a person touches another person, how he looks at him or her, in what tone he speaks. It can be said that it is rooted in the tenderness that a mother has for her child, but even so, human tenderness far surpasses the mother's tender affection for the child, since the former is free both from the biological bond with the child and from the narcissistic element of mother's love. She is free not only from greed, but also from impatience and purposefulness. Among all the feelings created by man in himself throughout history, there is, perhaps, not a single one that surpasses tenderness in a purely human quality.

Compassion and empathy- two other feelings, clearly related to tenderness, but not completely coinciding with it. The essence of compassion is that one person “suffers with” another person or, more broadly, “feels with” him. This means that one person looks at another not from the outside, as at a person who has become the "object" of my interest or concern (we should not forget that the words "object" are an object, a goal and "objection" - an objection, protest - one-rooted), but that one person places himself in another. This means that I experience in myself what he is experiencing. This attitude is not from I to You, it is characterized by the phrase: “I there is You ”(Tat Tvam Asi). Empathy or empathy assumes that I experience in myself what was experienced by another person, and, therefore, in this experience he and I are one. All knowledge about another person is valid insofar as it is based on my experience of what he is experiencing. If this is not the case and the person remains an object, maybe I know a lot about him, but I don’t I know him 1 . Goethe expressed this kind of knowledge very aphoristically: “Man knows himself only in himself, but he is aware of himself in the world. Each new object, really cognized, opens a new organ in ourselves ”.

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1 In psychoanalysis and similar forms of depth therapy, recognition of the patient rests on the analyst's ability to know him, not on the ability to gather enough information to know much about him. Data on the development and experiences of the patient are often useful in order to know him, but they are nothing more than an addition to that knowledge, which requires not “information”, but rather complete openness both in relation to the other and to oneself. Maybe this will happen in the first second of meeting a person, maybe a long time later, but the act of such recognition is always sudden and intuitive and is not at all the end result of the growing volume of information about the history of a person's life.

The possibility of this kind of knowledge, based on bridging the gap between the observing subject and the observed object, requires, of course, the humanistic approach, which I mentioned above, namely the recognition that each person carries within himself all human content, that we and the saints are in our souls. , and criminals, albeit to varying degrees, and, therefore, that there is nothing in another person that we could not feel as part of ourselves. This experience requires us to free ourselves from the narrow attachment only to what is close to us by blood ties, or, in a broader sense, close because we eat the same food, speak the same language, have the same common sense. To know people in the sense of sympathetic and penetrating knowledge, it is required to get rid of the narrowing attachment to a given society, race, culture and penetrate into the depths of human essence, in which we are nothing more than just people. Genuine compassion and knowledge of a person is largely underestimated as a revolutionary factor in human development, as has been observed with art.

Tenderness, love and compassion are refined sensory experiences and are generally understood as such. Now I want to discuss some "humanized experiences" that are not so clearly identified with feelings and are more often called attitudes. Their main difference from the experiences discussed so far is that they do not express a direct relationship to another person, but rather an experience within us, which only secondarily relates to other people.

The first among this second group I want to describe interest. Word interest for the most part has lost its meaning today. To say: "I am interested" (in this or that) is almost the same as to say: "I do not have a particularly strong feeling for this, but I am not completely indifferent to it." It's one of those words of cover that masks a lack of depth and is capacious enough to cover almost everything from an interest in acquiring shares in certain industrial enterprises to an interest in a girl. But even the widespread degeneration of words fails to deter us from using them in their original, deep sense, which implies returning them to their true dignity. Interest comes from the Latin inter-esse, which means to be placed between. If I am interested, I must surpass my ego, open up to the world, break into it. Interest is based on inner activity. This is a fairly permanent setting, allowing a person to reach out to external world both intellectually and emotionally and sensually. An interested person becomes interesting to others because interest has an infectious effect that awakens interest in those who could not show it without outside help. The meaning of the word "interest" becomes even clearer when we think about its opposite, curiosity. The curious person is basically passive. He wants to be saturated with knowledge and feelings, and everything is not enough for him, since the amount of information replaces him with a qualitative depth of knowledge. Gossip is a critical area of ​​curiosity, whether it’s the gossip of a small-town dweller who sits by the window and watches through a telescope, or the much more sophisticated gossip that populates newspaper columns discussed at faculty meetings, as well as at meetings of senior bureaucratic officials or at cocktails of writers and artists. By its very nature, curiosity is insatiable, because for all its maliciousness, it does not really answer the question: who is this other person?

Objects of interest are people, plants, animals, ideas, and social structures; the interests of a person to some extent depend on the temperament and characteristics of his character. However, the objects are secondary. Interest is an all-encompassing attitude and way of relating to the world; in the broadest sense of the word, it can be defined as the interest of a living person in everything that lives and grows. Even if the sphere of interest of a given person seems insignificant, but this interest is genuine, it will not be difficult to awaken his interest in other areas, simply because he is an interested person.

Another "humanized experience" to be discussed here is a responsibility. However, the word “responsibility” has lost its original meaning and is usually used as a synonym for duty. Duty is a concept from the realm of unfreedom, while responsibility is a concept from the world of freedom.

The difference between duty and responsibility corresponds to the difference between an authoritarian and a humanistic conscience. An authoritarian conscience is predominantly a willingness to follow the instructions of the authorities to which a person obeys; it is glorified obedience. Humanistic conscience is a willingness to listen to the voice of one's own humanity, regardless of someone else's orders.

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1 Freud's concept "Super-I" Is a psychological expression of an authoritarian conscience. It assumes that a person must obey the orders and prohibitions of the father, whose functions are later carried out by social authorities.

The other two types of "humanized experiences" are difficult to attribute to feelings, affects, attitudes. However, it does not really matter where they are attributed, since all these classifications are based on traditional distinctions, the justification of which is questionable. I mean feelings identity and integrity.

In recent years, the issue of identity has come to the fore in psychological discussions, largely influenced by the excellent work of Eric Ericson. He declared about the "identity crisis" and undoubtedly touched upon one of the most important psychological problems of industrial society. However, in my opinion, he did not go as far and did not penetrate as deeply as it would be necessary to fully understand the phenomena of identity and the crisis of identity. In an industrial society, people are turned into things, and things have no identity. Or is there? Isn't every Ford car of a certain year and a certain model identical to every other Ford car of the same model and different from other models or from releases of other years? Isn't every dollar bill identical to every other to the extent that they have the same design, value, exchange rate, but different from any other dollar bill in the condition of the paper caused by the duration of use? Things can be the same or different. However, when we talk about identity, we are talking about a quality that does not belong to a thing, but only to a person.

What is identity in human sense? Among the many approaches to this issue, I want to highlight only one - the interpretation of identity as an experience that allows a person with good reason to say: I am I AM, that is, the active center organizing the structure of all types of my real and potential activities. A similar experience I AM exists only in states of spontaneous activity; it is not in a state of inner passivity and half-asleep, when people are awake enough to do business, but are not yet awakened enough to feel I AM as an active center in ourselves 1. This understanding of the I differs from the concept of ego (I use this term not in the Freudian sense, but in the ordinary sense, when, for example, a person is said to have a “big ego”). The experience of my ego is the experience of myself as a thing, the experience of my own body, memory and all that there is I have: money, home, social status, power, children, problems. I look at myself as a thing, and my social role is another attribute of the thing. Many people easily confuse ego identity with identity. I AM or self-identity. The difference is profound and easy to discern. The experience of the ego and the feeling of identity with it is based on the concept of having. I AM about-

okay"Myself" just as I own other things. Identity I AM, or self-identity, refers us to the category of "to be" rather than "to have." I AM I am only as long as I am alive, interested, correlated with others, active, while in the very core of my personality I maintain the inner unity of my manifestations, both in relation to others and to myself. The identity crisis experienced in our time is mainly based on the growing alienation and reification of man; it is resolvable to the extent that a person manages to return to life and become active again. There is no psychologically shorter way to find a way out of the identity crisis, except for the fundamental transformation of an alienated person into a life-affirming person 2.

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1 In Eastern thinking, it was sometimes believed that this I-center is located at the point between the eyes, where, in mythological terms, there was a “third eye”.

2 Because of the brevity of this book, there is no room for a detailed discussion of the differences between the understanding of identity expressed here and Ericson's. Hopefully, if the opportunity presents itself, post a detailed breakdown of this difference.

The increasing emphasis on the ego to the detriment of the self, the increasing emphasis on "have" instead of "to be" is vividly expressed in the development of our language. People have got into the habit of saying: “I have insomnia” - instead of: “I don't sleep well”; or: “I have a problem” - instead of: “I'm sad, I'm confused,” and all that jazz; or: "I have a happy marriage" (sometimes "a happy marriage") instead of saying, "My wife and I love each other." All concepts expressing the process of being were transformed into concepts associated with possession. The static, immovable ego refers to the world as an object of possession, while the self is related to the world through the process of participation. Modern man It has everything: a car, a house, a job, "kids", marriage, problems, difficulties, satisfaction, and if this is not enough, then a psychoanalyst. But - he is nothing.

The concept of integrity incorporates the concept of identity. It can be touched in passing, because integrity simply means the willingness not to violate your identity in any possible way. Today, the main temptation to break identity is associated with the opportunities to achieve success in an industrial society. Since life in society tempts a person to feel like a thing, a sense of identity is rare. But the problem is complicated by the fact that, along with identity as a conscious phenomenon described above, there is a kind of unconscious identity. By this I mean that although some people have consciously turned into things, they unconsciously carry a sense of self-identity precisely because social processes have not succeeded in completely transforming them into things. Perhaps these people, who have succumbed to the temptation to violate their integrity, experience an unconscious sense of guilt, which in turn generates a feeling of stiffness, although they do not understand the reasons for it. It is far too convenient for orthodox psychoanalytic procedure to explain guilt feelings as the result of incestuous desires or "unconscious homosexuality." The truth is that as long as a person is not completely dead in a psychological sense, he feels guilty for living without being whole.

Our discussion of identity and integrity must be supplemented by at least a brief mention of another attitude for which Monsignor W. Fox coined a magnificent word - vulnerability. A person who experiences himself as an ego and whose feeling of identity is an ego-identity naturally wants to protect this thing - himself, his body, memory, property, and the like, as well as his opinion and his emotional dress, which has become part of his ego ... He is in a state of defense against every person or any experience that can interfere with the immutability and integrity of his mummified existence. On the contrary, a person who feels himself not so much having as existing, allows himself to be vulnerable. Nothing belongs to him; he just there is, while alive. But at every moment of loss of a sense of activity, when he is dispersed, he is in danger of not having anything, and not being anything. He can cope with this danger only through constant vigilance, vigilance and life affirmation. He is vulnerable compared to the safe ego person, because the latter It has anything except being.

Now I should talk about hope, faith, and courage as other “humanized experiences,” but having expounded them at length in the first chapter, I can refrain from further consideration of this issue.

A discussion of the manifestations of "humanized experiences" would remain very incomplete if we did not set out the essence of the phenomenon that is latently present at the basis of the concepts discussed here. This is about transcendence. The term “transcendence” is traditionally used in a religious context and refers to going beyond human dimensions in order to achieve the experience of the divine. This definition of transcendence is perfectly justified in the theistic system. From a non-theistic point of view, we can say that the concept of God was a poetic symbol for the act of getting out of the prison of one's own ego and achieving freedom on the path of openness and correlation with the world. If we are talking about transcendence in a non-theistic sense, there is no need for the concept of God. However, the same is the psychological reality. The basis for love, tenderness, compassion, interest, responsibility and identity is precisely to be, not to have, but it means surpass the ego. It means letting your ego leave you, letting your greed leave; empty yourself in order to refill; impoverish yourself in order to become rich.

In our desire to survive physically, we obey the biological impulse imprinted in us from the very inception of living matter and transmitted to us through millions of years of evolution. The desire to live "apart from the sphere of survival" is the creation of a historical person - his alternative to despair and failure.

The culmination of the discussion of "humanized experiences" is the assertion that freedom Is the quality of a fully humanized being. As far as we transcend the sphere of physical survival, we are no longer driven by fear, powerlessness, narcissism, dependence, etc., so much we are above compulsion. Love, tenderness, reason, interest, integrity and identity - they are all children of freedom. Political freedom is a condition of human freedom only insofar as it contributes to the development of the specifically human. Political freedom in an alienated society becomes unfreedom because it contributes to the dehumanization of man.

6. VALUES AND STANDARDS

So far, we have not touched on one of the fundamental elements of the situation in which a person finds himself. I mean a person's need for values ​​that guide his actions and feelings. Of course, there is usually a gap between what a person considers to be his values, and the actual values ​​that he is guided by and which he is not aware of. In an industrial society, officially recognized, conscious values ​​are religious and humanistic: individuality, love, compassion, hope, etc. But for most people, these values ​​have become manifestations of ideology and do not have a real impact on the motivation of human behavior. Unconscious values ​​that serve as direct motives of human behavior are values ​​generated by the social system of a bureaucratized industrial society, that is, property, consumption, social status, entertainment, strong sensations, etc. The discrepancy between conscious and ineffective values, on the one hand, and unconscious and effective - on the other hand, it devastates the personality. Forced to act differently from what he was taught and adherence to what he professes, a person begins to feel guilt, suspicion of himself and others. This is the very discrepancy that our young generation noticed and against which they took an uncompromising position.

Both the officially recognized values ​​and those actually existing are not devoid of structure; they form a hierarchy in which some of the highest values ​​define all others as correlative concepts necessary for the realization of the former. The specifically human experiences that we have discussed evolve to form a value system within the psychospiritual tradition of the West, India, and China over the past four thousand years. As long as these values ​​rested on revelation, they were obligatory for those who believed in the source of revelation, by which, as far as the West is concerned, God is meant. (The values ​​of Buddhism and Taoism are not based on the revelation of a supreme being. More specifically, in Buddhism, values ​​are derived from observing the basic condition of human existence - suffering, from recognizing greed as its source and from recognizing ways to overcome greed, that is, the "eightfold path." For this reason, the Buddhist hierarchy of values ​​is available to everyone who has no other prerequisites other than rational thinking and truly human experience.) With regard to the West, the question arises whether the hierarchy of values ​​represented by Western religion can have any other basis than divine revelation.

Among the models that do not accept Divine authority as the basis of values, we eventually find the following.

1. Complete relativism, which proclaims that all values ​​are a matter of taste for each person, outside of which they have no grounds. Sartre's philosophy is basically no different from such relativism, since a project freely chosen by a person can be anything, and therefore the highest value, as long as it is genuine.

2. Another view of values ​​is the recognition that values ​​are inherent in society. Defenders of this position proceed from the premise that the survival of any society with its own social structure and contradictions must be the highest goal for all its members and, therefore, the norms that contribute to the survival of a given society are the highest values ​​and are obligatory for every individual. From this point of view, ethical norms are identical with social ones, and social norms serve to perpetuate a given society, including its injustices and contradictions. It is obvious that the elite ruling society uses all the means at its disposal in order to give the social norms on which its power rests, the appearance of sacred and universal, portraying them either as a result of divine revelation, or as belonging to human nature.

3. Another concept of values ​​is the concept of biologically immanent values. The arguments of some representatives of this line of thought boil down to the fact that experiences such as love, devotion, group solidarity are rooted in the corresponding feelings of animals: human love and tenderness are seen as leading their origin from the maternal relationship to young animals; solidarity as rooted in the group cohesion that characterizes many animal species. Much can be said in defense of this view, but it does not answer critics' question about the difference between human tenderness, solidarity, and other "humanized experiences" and that observed in animals. The analogies drawn by authors such as Konrad Lorenz are far from convincing. Recognition of a biologically immanent value system often leads to results that are directly opposite to the humanistically oriented system discussed here. In the well-known variety of social Darwinism, selfishness, competition and aggressiveness are presented as the highest values, since they seem to be the main principles on which the survival and evolution of species rest.

The value system that corresponds to the view expressed in this book is based on what Albert Schweitzer called "reverence for life." Anything that contributes to the fuller development of specifically human abilities and that sustains life is considered valuable and good. Anything that suppresses life and paralyzes a person's inner activity is negative or bad. All the norms of the great humanistic religions - Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam - or the great humanist philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics to modern thinkers, represent a specific development of this general principle of values. Overcoming one's own greed, love for one's neighbor, the search for truth (as opposed to uncritical knowledge of facts) - these are the goals common to all humanistic philosophical and religious systems of the West and the East. A person was able to discover these values ​​only after reaching a certain social and economic level of development, which left him enough time and energy to think exclusively about what is on the other side of purely physical survival. But since this point was reached, the values ​​have taken root, and to some extent have entered the practice of completely disparate societies - from the thinkers of the Jewish tribes to the philosophers of the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire, theologians of medieval feudal society, thinkers of the Renaissance, philosophers of the Enlightenment, up to such thinkers of industrial society as Goethe, Marx, and in our time - Einstein and Schweitzer. There is no doubt that in this phase of industrial society, the implementation of these values ​​becomes more and more difficult precisely because the reified person almost does not feel life in himself, instead following the principles programmed for him by the machine.

The true hope of victory over the dehumanized mega-machine society in the name of building a humane industrial society stipulates that traditional values ​​will be introduced into life and a society will emerge in which love and integrity are possible.

Having stated that the values ​​that I have called humanistic deserve respect and attention due to the fact that they are unanimously accepted in all higher forms of culture, I must ask the question whether there is objective scientific evidence that makes you think, or at least inspires thought. that there are norms that should motivate our privacy and that should be the guiding principles of all social initiatives and activities that we plan.

Referring to what was said earlier in this chapter, I dare to argue that the validity of norms is based on the conditions of human existence. The human personality constitutes a system that meets at least one minimum requirement: to avoid insanity. But once this requirement is met, the person has a choice. He can devote his life to accumulation or production, love or hate; to be, or to have, etc. It does not matter what he chooses; he still creates a character structure with one dominant orientation and others that necessarily follow from it. The laws of human existence in no way lead to the establishment one set of values ​​as the only possible one. They lead to choice, and we have to decide which of the alternatives to give preference to others.

But do we consider the issue resolved when we talk about "higher" norms? Who decides which is higher? It will be easier to answer this question if we start by looking at a few specific alternatives. If a person is imprisoned, he will become either submissive and lifeless, or violent and aggressive. If he is bored, he will become passive and indifferent to life. If he is reduced to the level of a punch card, he will lose his originality, creativity, interests. If I exaggerate some factors, I accordingly underestimate others.

Then the question arises which of these possibilities should be considered preferable: a lively, joyful, interested, active, peaceful character structure or a lifeless, dull, disinterested, passive, aggressive one.

It is important to acknowledge that we are dealing with structures and cannot pick our preferred parts from one structure and combine them with the preferred parts of another structure. What is ours public life, as, incidentally, and individual, structurally formed, narrows our choice to a choice between structures, and not between individual features, separately or in combination. Indeed, most people would like to be assertive, competitive, most successful in the marketplace, loved by all and at the same time gentle, loving, wholesome. Or on a social level, people would like a society in which material production and consumption, military and political power are maximally developed and at the same time that supports peace, culture and spiritual values. Such ideas are unrealistic, and "beautiful" human traits in such a mixture usually serve as a cover for the ugly sides of reality. As soon as a person admits that he has to choose between different structures, and clearly realize which structures are “really possible”, the difficulty of choosing is significantly reduced and there is almost no doubt about which value system to prefer. People with different character structures will be supporters of a value system corresponding to their character. So, a life-loving person will make a decision in favor of life-affirming values, a lover of deadness - in favor of deadening values. Those in the middle will try to avoid explicit choices, or ultimately make choices in accordance with the dominant forces in their character structure.

Even if one could objectively prove that one value system is superior to all others, in practice we would have achieved little. Objective evidence would not at all seem compelling to those who disagree with the value system, the superiority of which is recognized by the majority; who disagree with her because she contradicts the requirements rooted in the structure of his character.

Nevertheless, I take the liberty of asserting, mainly for theoretical reasons, that one can come to objective norms if we proceed from one premise: it is desirable that a living system develops and produces maximum vitality and inner harmony that are subjectively perceived as well-being. Consideration of the system A person can show that life-loving norms are more conducive to the growth and strengthening of the system, while necrophilous norms contribute to dysfunction and pathology. The norms would then be justified on the basis of how successfully they promote optimal development and well-being and minimize painful deviations.

In reality, most people oscillate between different value systems and therefore never fully develop in one direction or another. They have no special virtues or special vices. As Ibsen famously put it in Peer Gynt, they are like a worn coin. Man has no self, he is not identical with himself, but he is afraid to make this discovery.

Sections: Classroom leadership

Pedagogical goal: the formation of the conviction of children that humanity, a human attitude towards others in Everyday life, respect for people, sympathy and trust in them are the basis of human life, the recognition of a Human as the highest value on Earth.

Course of the lesson

Good afternoon, dear guys. Today we come together again to reflect together on the problems of life and find possible ways their solutions.

(Topic name class hour and the epigraph is not yet revealed to children, the intrigue remains.)

And before we outline the topic of conversation, I invite you to become casual witnesses of one dialogue that happened between young people, perhaps in our school. Please help me with this ________________.

Dialogue between a high school student and a student "Talk about the Great" 1

Senior student: It's a pity that we live in such an uninteresting time. People used to do great things, but now they only earn money.

Student: What do you think is a great act?

Senior student: When a person forgets about himself, and everything that he has is ready to give for another.

Student: Aren't there such people now ?! A mother who gives her life to a child; a teacher who forgets about sleep and time for the sake of children; a doctor who saves a patient from death; an officer who shields his recruits from a stray shell - are they not great people!

Senior student: Something I have not seen in my life great doctors and teachers!

Student: There have always been few such people, both before and now. But when you yourself devote your life to doing something great, there are more of them.

At this point, we will stop the dialogue between two young people (thanks the guys for their help).

Can we now help a student answer a high school student's question? Please. (if not)

Well, then we'll do it a little later, but for now let's turn to the epigraph of our meeting (highlighted on the board):

Teacher: What do you think, what will be discussed today?

Guys: Right, about humanity. And what is HUMANITY? / answer /

"Humanity - humanity, human attitude towards others."
Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language D.N. Ushakova

“Humanity is a moral quality that expresses the principle of humanism as applied to the everyday relationships of people. It includes a number of more private qualities - benevolence, respect for people, sympathy and trust in them, generosity, self-sacrifice for the sake of others' interests, and also presupposes modesty, honesty, and sincerity. " Philosophical Dictionary

Guys, I ask you to name the most important, in your opinion, problems of modern society.

/ They are called: bad ecology, loneliness, drug addiction and alcoholism, illiteracy, poor medical care and others. At that time one of the students writes them down briefly to the table on the board:

The teacher and the children discuss what qualities they need to have in order to help people cope with this or that problem (will, reason, kind heart).

What do you think is more important for a person: the ability to be human, a strong will or a mind? Which of these qualities is more important to you and why?

In which country do you think the people will be happier - with an inhuman, but clever and strong-willed ruler, or with a kind, but weak-willed and ignorant?

What does it mean to listen to your heart?

"Will, mind, heart and science"

Will, Reason and Heart once turned to Science to resolve the dispute: which of them is more important.

Volya said: “Hey, Science, you know, without me, nothing reaches perfection: to know yourself, you have to study hard, and without me you can't do it; serving the Almighty, worshiping him, not knowing peace, is possible only with my help. It is impossible, if I am not there, to achieve wealth, skill, respect, career in life. Am I not I protect people from petty passions and keep them in check, am I not warning them against sin, envy, temptations, am I not helping them to gather their strength and last minute stay on the brink of the abyss? How can these two argue with me? "

Reason said: “Only I am able to recognize which of your words is useful and which is harmful, whether in earthly or afterlife. Only I can comprehend your language. Without me, one cannot escape evil, one cannot find benefits, one cannot comprehend knowledge. Why are these two arguing with me? What are they good for without me? "

The heart said: “I am the ruler of the human body. The blood comes from me, the soul dwells in me, life is unthinkable without me. I deprive them of sleep, I make those who lie in soft beds toss and turn, I make them think about the poor, homeless, freezing and starving. By my will, the younger revere the adults and are indulgent towards the lesser. But people do not try to keep me clean and they themselves suffer from this. If I were pure, I would not distinguish between people. I admire virtue, I rebel against evil and violence. Humanity, conscience, mercy, kindness - everything comes from me. What are these two good for without me? How dare they argue with me? "

After listening to them, Science replied: WHAT DO YOU THINK?(the teacher asks the children a question and then continues)

“Volya, you said everything right. You still have many virtues that you did not mention. Nothing can be achieved without your participation. But in you there is also a cruelty equal to your strength. You are firm in serving good, but you are no less firm in serving evil. That's what's bad about you.

Intelligence! And you're right. It is impossible to achieve anything in life without you. Thanks to you, we will learn about the Creator, initiated into the secrets of two worlds. But this is not the limit of your capabilities. Cunning and deceit are also the creations of your hands. Both good and evil rely on you, you faithfully serve both. This is your flaw.

My task is to reconcile you. It would be good if the Heart was the sovereign and arbiter in this dispute.

Intelligence! You have many paths, paths. The heart cannot follow each of them. It not only rejoices in your good intentions, but also accompanies you in them eagerly. But it will not follow you if you have planned something unkind, and will even move away from you with disgust.

Will! You have a lot of strength and courage, but the Heart is able to hold you too. It will not hinder you in a prudent business, but in an unnecessary business it will tie you around.

You should unite and obey the Heart in everything. If all three of you peacefully get along in one person, then the ashes from his feet will be able to heal the blind. You will not find agreement, I will give preference to the Heart. Protect your humanity. The Almighty judges us on this basis. So it is said in the Scriptures, ”said Science.

Conversation on questions:

What Science do you think the Will, Mind and Heart turned to?

Have you ever felt that you are ruled by your heart, and sometimes by will or reason? Under whose "rule" is it easier for you to live?

What can happen to a person if his heart ceases to control him?

The guys are divided into groups of 3-4 people and draw out cards with situations where one proves that will is more needed, the other is reason, and the third proves that the problem cannot be solved without humanity. At this time, the rest of the guys play the role of arbiters: which decision is humane?

1) Your grandmother is seriously ill and there is no one in the family to look after her

2) You dream of going to college, but you are lagging behind in many subjects

3) You constantly quarrel with your parents, although deep down you understand that they are right

4) None of your friends congratulated you on your birthday

Further there may be written work or homework: write down, in order of importance, those qualities that they consider necessary, but not quite formed in themselves, and then draw up a plan for the development of these qualities.

For example, how to develop humanity in yourself

Get interested! Only a person who is sincerely interested in the people around him and the world around him can be called human.

Charity. Participation in charity events, active assistance to those in need develop humanity.

Indifference. At the everyday level, it can be expressed in the fact that a person will not pass by someone who has fallen on the street, but will try to help him. This is how humanity develops.

Let's create together the "Sun of Humanity"

Who do they say that his heart is wide open? THIS is the SUN-man.

Divide the children into groups and give out sheets of paper or Whatman paper and ask them to draw the sun of humanity. Each draws his own ray and signs on it the name of the person who helped in a difficult moment of life, treated him like a human being. Then the children take turns talking about their rays, and the drawings are used to make an exhibition "The Sun of Humanity".

Together we draw the sun on the board (there is already a blank). The guys take turns approaching the SUN and paint on beams on which they sign the names of kind people and briefly talk about them.

Reflection

Do you guys remember the beginning of our meeting? (opens a slide with words)

Student: There have always been few such people, both before and now. But when you yourself devote your life to doing something great, there are more of them.

Senior student: But what great thing can I do today?

How would you answer a high school student now?

What do you call a great deed?

Think, indifference and attention to others and your loved ones can be called a great act?

Video parable "About a sparrow" (duration 5 minutes)

After the parable: How is it? (share their impressions)

Thank you guys for your attentive and non-indifferent attitude to our conversation and at the end of it I want to tell you a story.

Some time ago, at the Seattle Olympics, nine athletes stood at the start of a 100-meter track. They were all physically or mentally disabled.

A shot rang out and the race began. Not everyone ran, but everyone wanted to take part and win.

They ran a third of the distance when one boy stumbled, did some somersaults and fell. He started to cry. The other eight members heard him cry. They slowed down and looked around. They stopped and came back. Everything.

A girl with Down syndrome sat down next to him, hugged him and asked:

"Are you better now?"

Then all nine of them walked shoulder to shoulder to the finish line.

All the spectators got up and applauded. The applause lasted a very long time ...

Those who saw it are still talking about it. Why?

Because deep down inside ourselves, we all know that the most important thing in life means a lot more than winning for ourselves.

The most important thing in life is helping others to win. Even if it means you need to slow down or change your own race.

"A candle loses nothing if another candle is lit from its flame."

The teacher hands out as a gift the rays of the sun of humanity, on which are written wise thoughts about humanity, in the background Denis Maidanov's song "I am rich" sounds.

___________________

1 The heights of wisdom: 50 lessons about the meaning of life (For classes with children of middle and senior school age) / A. Lopatina, M. Skrebtsova - M.: Amrita-Rus, 2006 .-- 214 p. : ill. - (Series "Education and Creativity").

The question of what a person is is an eternal philosophical question to which many different answers are given. They cannot be reduced to one thing, since this is an ideological issue and, moreover, a central one. From what a person wants to see and sees himself, what the world will be like for him, that is hispeace and how he will feel in this world.

There is no doubt that man occupies a special place in the world. But what exactly is its fundamental difference from all other creatures? The answer to this question will determine something essential in a person.

The traditional philosophical understanding of essence (essentia) proceeds from its opposition to existence (existentia), phenomena. The corresponding philosophical question is connected with finding out whether essences (universals, ideas, concepts) can exist independently, independently of things, or only in things. Regardless of the answer to this question, the very existence of the essence of things did not question. However, with the essence human the matter is more complicated. If the life of an animal can be represented as the implementation of a certain program inherent in the entire genus, or its essence, then can we say the same thing about a person - that his existence is the realization of some originally given essence? Is there a "man at all"? In other words, is there something that could be defined as a common essence for all people or a common nature (most often in a similar context, the concepts of "human essence" and "human nature" are considered synonymous, although sometimes they try to identify their differences )?

The philosophical question of whether human nature exists implies finding out the possibility of talking about humanity in a broader sense than anatomical or physiological. It is interesting not just as a purely academic issue, but rather as a problem of the possibility and limits of human understanding. Let us note that the empirically discovered possibility of understanding other cultures, it would seem, irrefutably testifies to the presence of a certain common basis for all people: “How could we understand a“ stranger ”if he was, in principle, different from us? How could we understand the art of completely different cultures, their myths, their drama, their sculpture; does this not indicate that we all have the same human nature? The whole concept of humanity and humanism is based on the idea of ​​human nature inherent in all people. This is the starting point of both Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian tradition ”5. However, although mutual understanding is a fairly weighty argument in favor of the existence of a single entity for all people, it still cannot be considered proof. So, the philosophy of existentialism, proceeding from the statement that a person, unlike things made by a craftsman, has no essence that precedes his existence, that, on the contrary, existence precedes essence (J.P. Sartre), in no way denies the possibility of mutual understanding between people different cultures. In fairness, however, it should be noted that this point of view cannot be considered the most widespread, and besides, among the existentialists, only Sartre expresses it so categorically. The overwhelming majority of philosophers do not object to the idea of ​​the essence of man.

“Starting with the ancient Greek philosophers, it was customary to think that there is something in man that makes him essence; this "something" and was always called " human nature". Various views have been expressed as to what is included in this essence, but no one doubted that it exists, i.e. that there is something that makes a person a person. This is how the definition appeared: a person is a rational creature (animalrationale), a social animal (zoonpoliticon), an animal creature that produces tools (homofaber), and is also capable of creating symbols. Quite recently, these traditional views have been questioned ”6.

The recognition of the existence of human nature (essence) entails the need to determine it - whether it is biological, social, transcendental or "synthetic". However, as E. Cassirer notes, “if there is any definition of the nature or“ essence ”of a person, then this definition can be understood only as functional, not substantial. We cannot define a person with the help of any internal principle that would establish the metaphysical essence of a person ... The most important characteristic of a person, his distinguishing feature is not his metaphysical or physical nature, but his activity. It is labor, the system of types of activity that defines the area of ​​"humanity". Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are the constituent parts, different sectors of this circle ”7.

The "philosophy of man", therefore, should be such a philosophy that will reveal the fundamental structure of the diverse human activity and which at the same time will make it possible to understand this diversity as an organic whole.

It is hardly possible to take into account in the history of European philosophy all attempts to define a person, and this is not required, since the most significant of them have been preserved to this day by "historical selection." Guided by similar considerations and wanting to reduce "the dominant today in our Western European cultural circle ideas about man and his place in the diversity of existence to the brightest and most understandable ideal types", M. Scheler identifies five main types of human self-understanding, or " five main lines", Or five basic ideas about the essence of man 8. These ideas, which appeared in different eras, are united first of all by the fact that they all find supporters at the present time. In addition, each of these ideas expresses an attempt to highlight essential a sign that defines a person as a whole and provides a criterion for distinguishing a person from other creatures. At the same time, each of these ideas, accentuating one or another side of a person as the main, essential, inevitably thereby determines its own limitations, one-sidedness and, just as inevitably, therefore, presupposes the presence of other points of view.

1. The idea of ​​religious belief... In this case, we mean the Christian concept of man as the image and likeness of God. This idea is important if only because "Christianity is the only religion in world history, in which the immediately given human destiny becomes the symbol and focus of all creation."

According to Christian beliefs, man is the only living being endowed with in spirit, which determines the inner connection of man with God, the striving of man towards the transcendent, as opposed to the earthly. Man, according to Christian ideas, is the crown of creation: “creations, with the exception of man, were created in accordance with the prototype and likeness of“ something existing in God ”or“ belonging to God, ”while man is in the image and likeness of the Divine essence in the whole. Therefore, a person should be deeply grateful to God and should, in the readiness of his heart, turn to him again ”10; “The spirit will return to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12: 7).

Referring to Augustine, Meister Eckhart wrote: “Here you should know what the teachers say, that there are two people living in every person. One is called the outer man, this is sensuality. This man is served by five senses, but the outer man himself acts with the power of the soul. Another person is called the inner person, this is the innermost person. " In other words, “people have a double nature in themselves: body and spirit”, and “the spirit of man and his flesh at all times fight against each other. The flesh attracts to vice and evil, the spirit calls to God's love, to joy, peace and to all virtue ”11.

The purpose and meaning of a Christian's life is salvation from a world filled with evil, and the acquisition of eternal life in the kingdom of God. This is possible thanks to the incarnation of the Logos (God the Son). On the basis of the unique Christian concept of the God-man, salvation is understood as deification man, that is, the accession of God in the soul of man; the path of salvation is an approach to the moral ideal, which is Jesus Christ. In this way, the oneness of man with God, lost in the fall, is restored, and both the fall and salvation occur as a result of the free expression of the will of man.

2. The idea of ​​"homo sapiens", which arose in ancient philosophy and is associated with the names of Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle. This tradition of objective idealism has been preserved in anthropology for many centuries; in modern times, it was most clearly expressed in German classical philosophy.

It is believed that the world is based on some absolute rational principle (idea, reason, Logos), and only man of all natural beings is not only generated, but also endowed with such a principle. Often the human mind is understood as a partial function of the divine (universal) Mind (the cosmic Logos and the individual logos coincide). Therefore, the human mind turns out to be identical to the rational basis of nature, which is expressed in the ability of a person to cognize the ideal basis of things and himself. Thus, a significant difference between humans and animals is determined by the presence Logos, ratio (of reason), thanks to which a person is able to cognize things not as they only appear (to the senses), that is, at the level of phenomena, but as they are in themselves, that is, at the level of entities.

The one-sidedness of such concepts lies in the exaggerated cultivation of intelligence, understood as thinking in concepts; in this case, an illegal identification of intellect and consciousness is implicitly carried out. Consciousness as a whole is much more complex and diverse; conceptual thinking, intelligence - this is only one side of consciousness. The concept of consciousness encompasses both logical, discursive, conceptual, analytical thinking (the thinking of a scientist), and the opposite - aesthetic, intuitive, figurative, synthetic - perception (the artist's perception); scientific and artistic comprehension of existence is complemented by moral ideas about what is due.

In addition, declaring reason as the fundamental principle, it is opposed to nature as truth, strength, power; this teaching, as M. Scheler notes, has acquired a dangerous character for Europe. Taken as something self-evident, this idea formed the basis of European rationalism in philosophy and, accordingly, caused a feeling of the irresistible power of the rational principle embodied in science and technology.

3. Naturalistic ideas about the essence of man.

(According to M. Scheler, a wide range of teachings about man - naturalistic (mechanistic and vitalistic), positivist and pragmatic - are covered by the formula "homo faber"; it seems, however, that the legitimacy and expediency of this generalization are not obvious, and therefore their special justification is required.)

The general natural philosophical position is the understanding of man as a part of nature. Accordingly, the differences between man and animal are considered not essential (qualitative), but only quantitative - according to the degree of manifestation of a particular ability. At the same time, the spiritual and mental in a person is considered to be something derived from the sensual (from sensations), and a person turns out to be a being determined by drives. At the same time, the spiritual is often understood only as a certain level of development of the intellect, moreover, the intellect is predominantly technical (in animals, the presence of elementary intellect is recognized). “What is called spirit, reason, does not have an independent, isolated metaphysical origin and does not have an elementary autonomous regularity, in accordance with the very laws of being: it is only the further development of higher mental abilities, which we find already in great apes  ... This“ technical intellect "is attributed to completely unambiguous correlates in the functions of the nervous system, as well as to any other mental process and other mental interconnections. For the “spirit” here is only a part of the “psyche” - the inner side of the life process ”12.

A person in the natural philosophical understanding turns out to be a somewhat special living being:

in-the first, this living creature is endowed with a brain that consumes significantly more energy than the brain of an animal; a person is therefore called a "slave of the cerebral cortex": a significant part of the energy assimilated by a person is not consumed by the entire organism as a whole, but goes one-sidedly to support the activity of the brain;

Secondly, it is such a living being that creates and uses tools - both practical and mental activity (signs are "refined" tools);

v-third, the basis for the attitude of this creature to the world is made up of drives (the three main types of drives in their hierarchical sequence are the drive for procreation, the drive for growth and power, the drive for food).

The connection between naturalistic ideas about a person (a being determined by drives) and the idea of ​​a homofaber (a person who produces tools of labor) is explained by the fact that tools of labor are required for the production of material goods, that is, to ensure the life of the organism, and this, in turn, is considered as necessary condition and basis of spiritual existence. Thus, the spirit falls into a clear dependence on bodily well-being, which is ensured by the satisfaction of instincts. At the same time, it turns out to be “convenient” to deduce the production of “spiritual instruments” - signs and symbols - from the production of instruments of labor.

4. The idea of ​​man's inevitable decadence throughout its history.

This idea proceeds from the fact of a person's biological inability to adapt to the world, his inability to live like a natural being. Since man is adapted to the world worse than animals, he is looking for some kind of workaround to preserve the species, which is becoming more and more difficult. Everything created by man (culture) is declared to be such bypass ways of survival. So, for example, a person creates tools in order to transfer part of the functions to them, and therefore, he himself gradually loses an increasing number of functions and, accordingly, the organs necessary for their implementation, that is, he degrades more and more. The entire culture thus turns out to be only a surrogate for life, created by man because of his biological weakness and devoid of value in the face of "life", and human history turns out to be a process of extinction of a species known to be doomed to death. At the same time, it is not taken into account that the rejection of a number of practical functions is accompanied, firstly, by the emergence of new ones that are not inherent in animals, and secondly, by the development of spiritual abilities - cognitive, aesthetic, moral.

Such ideas about the mind (and spirit in general) as a disease of life lead to the image Dionysian man who wants only to turn off his spirit and mind (drunkenness, dancing, drugs) in order to feel unity, to merge with the creative nature. If the degradation of man is understood as his "departure from nature", then the well-known slogan "Back to nature" inevitably follows from this. Dionysian man is a man of drives; he seeks to merge with the vital impulse that carries the "images of the world."

5. Superman idea F. Nietzsche.

The essence of man, according to the teachings of F. Nietzsche, is not expressed in all people. Zarathustra said thus: “Man is something that O it is false to surpass "," Man is a rope stretched between an animal and a superman - a rope over an abyss "13.

F. Nietzsche sought to elevate the type of man, offering the ideal of the superman. Superman is "a person who has the maximum of responsible will, integrity, purity, intelligence and power" 14. it spiritually a gifted person, an outstanding personality, a representative of a creative minority, the main subject of history, responsible for the fate of society and culture; the superman is opposed by a passive and largely impersonal mass, a crowd.

The concept of the superman is the answer to the question posed by Nietzsche himself about the justification of man. The idea of ​​a superman, according to M. Scheler, "allows a person's self-consciousness to rise to such a level, to soar to such a dizzying, proud height that no other known doctrine promised him." He calls this concept "postulatory atheism of seriousness and responsibility", when God is rejected "in the name of responsibility, freedom, purpose, in the name of the meaning of human existence" 15.

The thesis "God is dead" is found not only in Nietzsche. As you know, it is discussed, for example, by FM Dostoevsky in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov". The whole point, however, is not in this thesis in itself, but in the conclusions that are drawn from it. Nietzsche, in contrast to the conclusion of Ivan Karamazov "everything is allowed", comes to the opposite - "nothing is allowed." He transfers all responsibility from God to the superman. A. Camus wrote that “in the philosophy of Nietzsche, rebellion leads to asceticism. And the deeper logic of Nietzsche's reasoning replaces Karamaz's “if nothing is true, then everything is allowed” with the formula “if nothing is true, then nothing is allowed” 16.

The idea of ​​a superman is an atheistic idea that is associated with the denial of the existence of God for the sake of responsibility, freedom, purpose and meaning of human life. Here, the responsibility and sovereignty of a person are raised to the very limit.

so the five basic ideas about man identified by M. Scheler connect him either with the transcendental (the Christian idea of ​​man as an image and likeness of God), or with the ideal (rational man, homosapiens), or with material (a man who produces tools, homofaber) principles; at the same time, a person is either elevated, understanding as a “crown of creation” or as a “superman”, then they are reduced to a “part of nature” or even to a “failure” of nature, a “mistake of life”. Undoubtedly, all this reflects real-life problems and forms of human existence as manifestations a single person. Therefore, there are attempts to "synthetic" understanding of a person as an essentially dual integrity.

It has long been known about the concept of a person as “ citizen of two worlds ", going back at least to the philosophy of Plato and having further variations in the history of philosophy. (For example, a person as a "citizen of two worlds" simultaneously belongs to the "world of ideas" and the "world of things" - in the terminology of Plato, the "world of phenomena" and "the world of noumena" - in the terminology of German classical philosophy.)

This approach, to a certain extent, allows us to overcome the limitations of the considered ideas about a person. It is based on the paradoxical, at first glance, idea that a person is a living being, extremely opposite to living in general. A person as a vital (living) being is a dead end, as a spiritual one is a way out of a dead end. At the same time, understanding a person as a "citizen of two worlds" can serve as a metaphor for designating the fundamental internal contradiction of a person; the foundation of all the many contradictions will be the contradiction between the vital (related to the life of the organism) and the spiritual.

Modern science, when considering a person from the point of view of biological organization, reveals a number of his significant differences from animals. Firstly, this concerns its nervous system and, in particular, the brain, which are "arranged" much more complexly, and the brain has parts that are not found in animals. All this in itself creates an objective basis for a much more complex psyche. Secondly, a person's ability to instinctively adapt is minimal compared to all living things. This allows us to assume the presence of some other than instinctive way of adapting to the world, and it should be sought, obviously, in the field of the mental, which in humans has new capabilities in comparison with animals. “Man is the most helpless of all animals, but it is precisely this biological helplessness that is the basis of his strength, the main reason for the development of his specifically human qualities” 17. Man opposes nature in general as a being, which in its center is free from natural driving forces.

That which governs the relationship of man to the world is the extra-natural spirit, mind, consciousness, standing "above" biological existence. This is the basis of the definition of man given by M. Scheler: “Man is a being exalted and raised in himself above all life and its values ​​(and above all nature as a whole), - a being in which the psychic has been freed from the service of life and has been ennobled , having transformed into “spirit”, into the very spirit that “life” itself serves now both in the objective and in the subjective-psychic sense ”. He identifies three main truly human functions (spiritual and rational), which determine the conscious attitude to the world:

1) the ability of a person to be determined only by a thing, and not by an attraction (subject relation to the world);

2) "free from lust love to the world as something that rises above any relation to things determined by attraction ”;

3) the ability to distinguish essence from existing being, from random 18.

The spiritual and moral completion of the understanding of man as a social being was the logical idea of ​​him as a humane being, the idea of ​​humanity as a characteristic feature of the human race, which unambiguously follows from the pathetic questioning of the Emperor Julian: public animal.

And now, saying and affirming this, we will behave antisocial towards our neighbors ?! " [Yul. Sc. 45,292d]. Probably, Aristotle's definition of the basic form of human society - oichia: oikia levti rts piXia - can be documented to confirm the connection between the human public and his humanity. It follows from this that pvsis of a person is j> i \ ia.

In addition, a certain separation of man from the objective structures of the cosmos, focus on himself led to greater attention of philosophers to the subjective side of human existence, to the feelings and experiences of man, in general to everything "human" (res humanae), which is an immutable aspect of the humanistic understanding of man. Ancient humanism recognized the value of a person, elevated him, demanded respect for him and love, sympathy for his weaknesses and sufferings - in a word, it included everything that is included in modern humanistic views. For example, according to K. Lamont, the main goal of humanistic ethics is to promote this worldly human interests in the name of great happiness and glory of man. Humanism asserts the possibility and desirability of altruism (see:). True, in modern literature, many different points of view are expressed in relation to humanism. So, P. Trottignon considers Aristotle an "anti-humanist", namely, a realistic researcher of man, who considers him historically, from the point of view of the practice of the Greek world, in contrast to traditional literary humanists, who created the image of an abstract and unhistorical man (see:). There are other researchers who emphasize this feature of Aristotle's approach to the study of man. J. Verhage, for example, notes that Aristotle, regarding human action in the context of politics, does not speak about a person in general, but talks about a free citizen, a rich owner, a well-educated citizen who has leisure, a worker, a day laborer, a small trader, a woman, a slave (see .: ; see also: ).

The Greeks called humane qualities of people pi \ a \\ t) \ ia - friendliness (Democritus) or (piAavS-pooxia - humanity (Aristotle), and the Romans called humanitas - humanity (Cicero). These qualities were considered natural. Man was endowed with innate feelings of compassion towards people, a conscientious attitude towards them, solidarity, love, etc. In one of Cicero's letters, “all humanity” is revealed as “sensitivity.” :). Condolence is born to man. He renders good deeds to those in need at the command of his spirit.

The ultimate and potential source of the moral and humane qualities of man, Cicero considered his nature.

He writes that nobility, love for the fatherland, a sense of duty, the desire to serve one's neighbor and the manifestation of gratitude to him - all this "is born from the fact that we, by nature, are inclined to love people" [Cicero, 1966, I, XV, 43] ... One fundamental point of understanding of natural love by "preformists" should be noted here. Natural love for them is natural sexual love, leading to marriage and family, to home, to the emergence of the foundation of society. This is how Aristotle considers it, and Cicero speaks about it. Marriage is an expression and a source of love between people, since “it is all from nature that those who have given birth love their born”. From matrimony, “there was mutual love in kinship (families. -

AT 3. ; here the translator conveys Cicero in downright Greek, Aristotle's language: remember evvy u k ve ha) "[Cicero, 1793, IV,

VII]. However, it should be recalled that in Lucretius, whom we attributed to the "epigenetics", marriage and family are also the reason for the appearance of humane feelings in a person.

With regard to the development of a humanistic concept of man, then among the Greek philosophers we find only isolated isolated statements on the themes of humanism. The very first of them are associated with the ancient institution of hospitality (then patronage, patronage). So, in the Odyssey we read: “Everyone who asks for protection and a wanderer is a brother / to a husband who at least slightly touched the mind” [Od., VIII, 546-547]. The call to show humanism in political relations can be found among the Pythagoreans (the testimony and vocabulary of the late antique author Stobei): rulers should be humane (xovs), and those ruled, in turn, should be bossy (pikapjiovras) (see: [Mac; Diels, 45D , 4]). So it turns out rіLaLLuHia - love for each other, mutual love. In the scholias of Tsetz - a source on the philosophy of Democritus - people of the most ancient period are ascribed a mutually friendly life (fiiov pilaMrjXov) and exceptional mutual friendliness (pi \ a \ Xi) \ iav jiovov) without wars, violence and embezzlement, which, however, does not correspond to the views of himself Democritus, but, most likely, describes the mythological ideas about the golden age (see: [Lurie, 1970, 558, comments]). As the quintessence of the humanistic views of the sophists, the famous dictum of Protagoras is usually cited: "Man is a measure ..." (see:). Diogenes Laertius attributes the concept of "philanthropy" to Plato, who divided it into three aspects: friendliness, help, hospitality [Diog. Laertes., III, 98] 29.

From the philosophers of the Hellenistic-Roman era to Cicero, no significant statements on the problems of humanism reached either. It is possible to point to the Stoics, who demanded from masters respectful treatment of slaves as members of a family or as free wage laborers; from the rich-generosity to the poor (see:). The poets Ennius and Terentius are considered the forerunners of Roman humanism30. Annius wrote about friendly treatment based on comitas, urbanitas and humanitas, which was then guided by the famous Scipio circle (see:). And it was only Cicero's lot to become a true classic of humanistic anthropology in Antiquity. It is with his name that ancient humanism is associated31.

Cicero owns, if not the invention, then the wide distribution and introduction into the ethical-sociological views of the very term "humanity", "humanism" - humanitas. He applies this concept - humanitas (humanity) when characterizing the essential properties of a person, even his essence, and thus gives him an anthropological meaning. Humanitas is an extremely ambiguous concept. The totality of its meanings covers the entire sphere of a person's spiritual and social ties. For our topic, we need that area of ​​meanings of humanitas, which in the language of Cicero is associated with the concept of humanity, friendliness, etc. According to the testimony of Aulus Gellius, in common parlance (and therefore most widely) the word humanitas was used along with the Greek piXavSpooxia (see: [Nemilov, p. 6]). In the literature, all this is described in sufficient detail, so we will just give a couple of examples. The understanding of humanitas in the sense of kindness can definitely be seen in the opposition of mansuetndo and inhumanitas [Cicero, 1962, vol. 1. Speech against G. Verres * "On Executions", XLIV, 115]. This is also evidenced by the appeal of Cicero to the judges "according to the law of ordinary humanity (communis humanitatis) and according to mercy." He says about himself that in political struggle he is guided "not by a feeling of cruelty ... but by exceptional ... kindness (humanitate) and compassion" [Tsits. Cat., VI, II].

Cicero did not consider humanity to be an ethical norm and a moral imperative. He believed it to be a real quality of specific people, its carriers. She was a reality for him, manifested in human relationships. The basis for such a conclusion may be his reasoning about the humane statesman. For the first time, Cicero expresses his views on the humanism of a statesman, apparently in connection with the exposure of the abuses of Verres. He contrasts with him the outstanding commanders of the past M. Marcellus (3rd century BC) and P. Scipio (2nd century BC), whom he endows with features of humanity [Tsits. Verr. "On Objects of Art", XXXVII, 81; LV, 121]. These generals were guided in their actions by humanitas and turned the mi-sericordia to the benefit of the Roman state. Of his contemporaries, Cicero makes Gn. Pompey [Ibid. On Executions, LVIII, 153]. "The greatest humanity (humanitate)" he endows M. Lepidus, who, thanks to her, turned the most dangerous civil war to peace and harmony. Finally, Cicero, without false modesty, considered himself a humane person. And, I must say, there were considerable reasons for this, so that his assessment in this regard is quite objective. He himself followed humanistic principles, lived according to them, which is typical for philosophers adhering to stoic convictions, which he was. Cicero professed humanism both in his social activities and in his personal life. He began his public activity with the legal profession, which, however, did not change throughout his life, and the functions of a defender in court are humane in themselves. The humanism of his sense of justice demanded to rebuff injustice in any court case [Cicero, 1962, vol. 1. Speech in defense of S. Roscius from Ameria, 1.1]. If humanitas ceases to play the role of a restraining principle in human behavior, as was the case with Verres, then the court should be a means of coercion where the absence of humanitas gives rise to lawlessness (see:).

Cicero began his ascent up the ladder of public office with the duties of a quaestor in Sicily, and already there he showed himself to be a humane administrator in comparison with the Roman magistrates, who were distinguished by their shameless behavior. He behaved in the same way during the period of the proconsulate in Cilicia, when, as he writes, with his justice and gentleness towards the allies he achieved what “could not have been achieved by any legions”: he made the wavering more loyal, hostile-friendly [Tsits. Writ., CCXI, C C XXXVIII]. As a politician, Cicero declared himself a supporter of freedom and civil peace, an opponent of violence (in particular, during civil wars), expressing the character of his consulate with the phrase “Cedant arma togae”. During the civil strife between Caesar and Pompey, he sought to prevent an armed clash between them, hoping for a peaceful resolution of the contradictions [Tsits. Pis., CCCLX] and spoke in favor of resolving disputes through discussion, and not by force, as is characteristic of people, and not wild animals [Cicero, 1974c, I, XI, 34]. All this corresponds to the provisions that humanitas cultivates the world (see:). If the war could not be avoided, then Cicero demanded that in this case people observe the law and laws, do not allow themselves cruelty, show humanity towards the enemies [Cicero, 1974e, I, XI, 34-XIII, 40]. Inhuman (inhumanum) is to finish off those who are lying and defeated. About Dolabella, who showed insatiable cruelty and tormented a dead enemy, Cicero condemningly says: "Immemor humanitatis" ("Forgetting about humanity").

An indication of humanity is almost always present in the Cicero characteristics of a highly moral person, be it an ideal ruler or a real commander, a judge, just a person, including a very specific person. Among the personal qualities of an exemplary governor are the following: moderation, justice, willingness to protect the offended and hatred of dishonest people, gentleness, humanity. Pointing to the merits of one of his friends, Cicero lists the following: benevolence, piety, friendliness (humanitatem), conscientiousness. It should be recognized that humanity (humanity) is a property that performs an integrative function in relation to other spiritual and moral qualities, it is the main property, and it alone is enough to indicate the “public” of a person in its entirety, to indicate its essence. Chr. Rote and H. D. Meyer (see:). Without going into deep detail, it should be noted that the integrativeness of the concept of "humanity" is manifested in the fact that, in addition to its basic meaning (mercy, gentleness, etc.), it appears in the meaning of justice, beneficence, generosity, etc. In the treatise “About duties” is such a remarkable reasoning: if a person is alien to justice (iustitia) and fights not for general well-being, but for his own benefit, then there will be no valor, but “savagery” that rejects any kind of humanity (omnem humanitatem) [Cicero, 1974e; Cicero, 1971.1,

For the most part, Cicero describes manifestations of humanity in various ways. interpersonal relationships when he thinks about people and their connections. This is the ethical-anthropological sphere of application of the concept of humanitas. In the book of M. Shnaidevin there is a large section (third) "Ancient humanity in relation to man to man", written mainly on the material of Cicero, whom the author, by the way, calls the main representative of ancient humanity. To give the reader an idea of ​​the content of this section and, accordingly, of M. Shneidevin's understanding of humanity in interpersonal communication, let's name some of the topics covered in the paragraphs included in it: the dignity of life, gallantry, modesty, sincerity, respect, friendship, neighbors, women, slaves. M. Shnaidevin divides relations between people into two kinds: business and free. Business relations are governed by the laws of mutual interest, and humanity is not a decisive factor here. In free communication, a person enjoys a spiritual connection with another person. This free communication of people among themselves was imbued with humanity (see:). It is quite possible to agree with M. Shneidevin that ancient humanity requires, first of all, a highly moral life and sees in action for the sake of another, in altruism the touchstone of a truly moral act (see:). And Cicero himself speaks of this: after all, even “those who claim that everyone is dearer to himself” do not recognize it as fair, “in order to take something from another and then appropriate it for himself” [Cicero, 1973, III, XXI].

As a model for describing what Cicero himself said about humanity in relations between people, let us take the place from the treatise On Duties, which tells about the various levels of communication between people and states that “the best is human society and the union between people will be preserved in the event that we treat everyone with the greater disposition, the more closely he is connected with us ”[Cicero, 1974e, I, XVI, 50-XVIII, 59]. Specifically, here the following degrees of human connection are presented as they expand in the direction from the closest: with parents, children, relatives, relatives, friends, and further up to connection with the whole human race, with strangers LUDBMY. In the "Oratory divisions" among the "divine" (and therefore pleasing to the gods) deeds are named: respect for parents, friends (amicis), guests. A lot of material about humanism in personal life, especially in family relationships, gives the correspondence of Cicero. He considered love to be a feature of humane relations between spouses, children, brothers, all connected by nepotism and pointed out that although these ties are maintained thanks to respect (caritate), but most of all they are preserved thanks to love (amore). In addition, the word humanitas itself is used to describe the relationship of spouses to each other (see:).

It is worth paying attention to the attitude towards women and the elderly, since this is an important indicator of the humanity of society and the individual. In his correspondence, Cicero calls for respect for a woman, and he even dedicated a special essay "On Old Age" to the problems of old age. It condemns the prevailing neglect of the elderly and expresses a desire to alleviate their fate [Cicero, 1974a, III, 7; IX, 34; XVIII, 63-64]. Among the manifestations of humanism is also friendship, about which Cicero also wrote a treatise [Cicero, 19746]. It is no coincidence that humanitas includes the idea of ​​friendship and its proofs in word and deed (see:). The signs of friendship (amicitia) are respect (sagitas) and affection (amor). This type of relationship, but less intimate, includes ties between patron and client, between neighbors, and hospitality. M. Shnaidevin classifies the clientele in the category of "humane aspirations". It is characteristic that among the shortcomings of the Roman magistrate P. Vatinius, whom he condemned, Cicero notes his quarrelsomeness with neighbors, relatives, fellow tribesmen. He himself considers good neighborliness (vicinitas), which preserves the old understanding of duties, worthy of praise and even love. Humanitas, based on an exempla maiorum, has the character of a moral duty to protect a guest-friend from injustice (see:). To ruin a guest in front of the face of the Penate gods is a great villainy, exhorts Cicero Caesar.

Finally, in the widest circle of communication, humanity manifests itself towards all people. The humanity of the governor Cicero understands as caring for the inhabitants of any province, which he has to govern, as well as caring for all strata of society, therefore, as love for all people. He teaches brother Quintus: “If fate instructed you to rule the Africans or the Spaniards, or the Gauls, the wild and barbaric peoples, nevertheless, according to your humanity, you should take care of their well-being and act for the benefit and benefit of them” [Tsits. Writing, XXX]. Humanity extends even to slaves, whom Cicero did not refuse to belong to the human race. F. Cowell admits that Cicero was one of the few who demanded humane treatment of slaves, while his friend Varro reproduced the current concept of slaves as instruments endowed with speech (see:). In his treatise On Duties, Cicero raises the question of equating slaves with free wage laborers [Cicero, 1974e, I, XIII, 41]. Antinomies of moral consciousness are also given here concerning the attitude towards slaves, which arise in extreme situations[Ibid, III, XXIII, 89]. Cicero urges in relations with slaves to be guided not by benefit and benefit, but by humanity. He takes humanism even beyond the boundaries of humanity and extends it to the relationship of man to nature, the animal world and does not approve of the custom of his fellow citizens to kill animals during festive performances.

This unity of the individual with the whole race of people and even the animal world is the pinnacle of Cicero and all ancient humanism. Julian's words about helping even “hostile people” speak of his essentially human character: “After all, we give because he is a person, and not because of what kind of person he is” [Yul. Pis., 4S, 291]. Neoplatonists perceived the idea of ​​the equality of slaves and freemen, of their human dignity and greatness of spirit, to which Macrobius' speech is dedicated to Preteketat (see: [Zvirevich, 1987, pp. 130-136; Glover, pp. 180-181, not.]) ... R. Reitzenstein notes that humanitas becomes a general benevolence to any person, hospitality, gratitude, etc. (see:). “Everything that we can provide to other people without prejudice to ourselves must be given even to a person unknown to us,” wrote Cicero [Cicero, 1974e, XVI, 51]. Julian echoes him with a quote from Euripides: “A good man, even if he lives in a distant land, and I have never seen him, is a friend to me” [Yul. Pis., 390b (20, 34)]. It is this benevolent attitude to one's own kind that distinguishes man from animals, makes him a man himself. Cicero declares: "I myself will not consider myself a man, if I do not render my neighbor favors and all kinds of services" [Tsits. Written, DCCLXIII, 2]. He does not consider as a sign (proprium) of a person everything that is not marked by the sign of good deeds (beneficio) and goodwill (benevolentia). Therefore, it is quite possible to accept M. Shnaidevin's remark that humanitas is such a feature of a person that makes him S & ov xokninov (see:). With the words of M. Shnaidevin, we have closed the circle of human characteristics as a social and humane being: his public and humanity turned out to be interdependent. Taking humanity out of the public, we came to it as the foundation of the latter.

The outlined views of Cicero, summarizing the searches of his predecessors both among the Romans and among the Greeks, as well as the views of the thinkers who followed him, in particular the more than once mentioned emperor - the philosopher-neoplatonist Julian, who repeatedly expressed himself in his own way in a humanistic spirit and called “ most of all ... to show philanthropy, for many other benefits come from him ”[Yul. Pis., 45, 289b] 32, allow us to speak of humanism as a generic feature of the sociocultural anthropology of Antiquity, considering it an antique version of European humanism or humanistically colored anthropology, as well as a specific feature of its “preformist” branch, since humane qualities are recognized as innate. 3.5.3.

Each of us should be human by nature. Much has been said about morality - the basic components of humanity. But often, for one reason or another, this quality disappears somewhere. What does this term mean? And how can you determine whether a person has this quality or not?

Respect is at the core

First of all, humanity is the ability to respect other people. We can say that respect for others, as well as for oneself, is a fundamental quality for the development of this quality. This also includes the correct attitude towards nature and animals. Is it human who beats a cat or leaves trash after a picnic? Unlikely.

The property of a real person is tolerance

Respect also implies tolerance. Humanity - what is it if not the ability to be tolerant towards representatives of other religions and nationalities? Anyone who has respect for others in his heart is also capable of spirituality. Such a person lives by the principle: "Do with others the way you want them to do with you." The antonym of humanity - inhumanity - is a cruel attitude towards others, those who differ in some way. The inability to put oneself in the shoes of another person, even a weaker one, is a symptom of cruelty, deep inner failure, and often bad upbringing. After all, the person who lives in harmony with himself does not feel the need to humiliate others. Those who have the need to assert themselves at the expense of others, those who within themselves realize that they are worthless, behave inhumanly.

How does this quality manifest itself?

Humanity is the ability to be compassionate. However, this quality should not be confused with pity. The one who pity others - looks down on them, is not able to believe in their strength. A compassionate person is one who can understand the feelings of another person. Humanity is the ability to forgive someone who has made a mistake; the ability to understand another in his grief. How is true humanity manifested? It's easy to be merciful to a millionaire. For him, a few bills thrown to a beggar mean nothing. But true humanity manifests itself where there is no place for understanding in most cases. For example, it can be shown by a woman who has stopped loving her spouse, but shows sufficient tact and respect for his feelings. Humanity is also about the care of adult children for their elderly parents. When adults continue to care for them, even as they begin to suffer from various disorders, there is true compassion. And above all, such a quality can only be possessed by those who know how to be compassionate.

Moral

Another property of humanity is morality. Previously, it was believed that it is the law of a decent life, which was sent down to the human race from heaven. Morality has always been the invariable foundation of humanity, and it is the unwritten law of relationships between people. Everyone has this quality, and its basis is nothing more than conscience. Morality always guards the spiritual and psychological health of a person. This quality helps a person to remain not just a member of a consumer society, but also to be ready to fulfill their moral principles are an integral part of humanity.

Essay on the topic "Humanity": arguments

Those schoolchildren who write an essay on this topic can make the following arguments in their work. First, it can be pointed out that humanity is always correlated with morality; secondly, as already mentioned, this quality always includes the ability to compassion. In addition, one who is human is tolerant of others who are different from him.

Raising humanity

People are different - sometimes strict, reserved; sometimes cheerful and good-natured. But the main property that is inherent in a person with any character is humanity. In fact, every person has inner kindness, the ability to be compassionate, show mercy, and do. Sometimes, for some reason, people do not show these qualities. But it is quite possible to develop them - both for a child and an adult.

Those who are cold and indifferent to those around them are likely to experience the torment of loneliness. He cannot manifest humanity, because at a certain stage in his life he did not develop compassion in himself. We all know cases when some children show cruelty - for example, they torture animals. Thus, cruelty, lack of mercy develops. We can say that a crime against humanity is not only actions that speak for themselves (theft, disrespect for elders, violation This is also a lack of good upbringing. learns to put himself in the place of another living being, then it is unlikely that he will have such a quality as humanity.