The history of world thought knows many different approaches to the problem of the human personality. Each culture forms its own understanding of what a person is, what is his place in the world. And despite all the diversity of philosophical teachings, it is precisely the question of man that always remains the most essential question for every era, for every thinker. Ultimately, it is to solve this question that all the complex analysis of philosophical problems is undertaken, for the sake of answering this most urgent question, all philosophical disputes are conducted. Often these disputes look very abstract, seem to have little to do with the vital needs of a person, but in order for their true meaning to be revealed, it is only necessary to realize that they are always talking about yourself: not about something extraneous, not about your individual affairs, but about you and your place in the universe.
The problem of man was by no means the first philosophical problem. And in Ancient Greece, and in the East, wherever philosophical reflection begins, it begins with attempts to understand the world, with the search for the origin of everything. Early philosophy almost does not consider the problem of man, but the very emergence of philosophy reveals precisely this problem: a being has appeared in the world that calls the whole world into question, which seeks to build its own relations with the world, which embraces the whole world with its thought and enters into a relationship with the world. equal dialogue.
At the beginning of his history, man is completely unadapted to the world, physically he is small, weak and insignificant in comparison with the world. In fairness, it must be said that even today man remains, by his physical nature, just as small, weak and insignificant in the face of the world, despite all his undoubted successes in the field of civilization. But man is undoubtedly great: he is not only equal to the world, he turns out to be even “greater” than the world when he enters into a dialogue with the world. No matter how primitive a person’s life is, no matter how hard a person lives in the Stone Age or the Atomic Age, he was always and everywhere able to say: “We shouldn’t bend under the changing world, let it bend under us!”
And in ancient times, and now these words do not mean, of course, that the surrounding world has no power over a person, that it cannot influence his life. But still, a person has a certain independence from the world, a certain freedom in the world, he does not act automatically, not only under the influence of blind instincts, not only under the influence of external circumstances — a person has a choice and responsibility. A person depends on many things, it would be more accurate to say: he depends on everything, often behaves obediently and predictably, but there is “his own will” in him, which is a law to itself, and it can manifest itself at any moment. Each person is a separate and unique world, as inexhaustible as the universe.
We have already said that those thinkers with whom the history of philosophical thought traditionally begins (the Miletus school in ancient Greece and, more broadly, the pre-Socratics), ignore the problem of man. Unfortunately, this is not surprising: after all, those thinkers with whom the history of ethics traditionally begins (the sophists) frankly denied morality in its very essence. Philosophy in general is apparently based on oblivion: something important has been forgotten, some of the most important wisdom has been lost, and now we need to find it again. According to Aristotle, philosophy begins with wonder. And this surprise comes from the fact that suddenly a person discovers that he does not know the most important thing. And the next — and much stronger — surprise overtakes him when, having met with the wisdom he was looking for, he understands: yes, after all, I ALWAYS knew this, and how could I forget IT!
Forgotten in philosophy from the very beginning is the most important thing: the personality of man. The existence of man is conceived in philosophy, starting from antiquity, and then all the way, as one of the varieties of the existence of the world: there is a tree and there is a river, there is a man and there is a crocodile — and all this is a single organism of the world, all this is one Being in different their manifestations. It is that feature of the ancient worldview that most attracts many with its seeming depth, which is the most striking manifestation of the loss of the real depth of understanding of the ontological status of a person. This feature is called «cosmism». Man is conceived by the Greeks as a small world, «microcosm», as an organ in the organism of the world, «macrocosm». Man and the world are the same in structure: everything that is in the world is also in man, and there is nothing in man that would not be in the world. Only the world is a large organism, and man is a small organism subordinated to a large one.
Instead of thinking through his own being from within himself, trying to understand the meaning of this amazing event of his own personal presence in the world, instead of understanding his own personality as a completely unique act of being, a person in philosophy, starting from antiquity, began to bring himself as a species under the general concept of being. He began to bring his own act, in which for the first time he finds himself and his being comes true, under the general laws of this world Being and, summing up, finally replaces his unique “I” with a certain “common place”. The loss of the concept of the mystery of personal being is inherent not only in ancient philosophy (where just at times the desire to regain the lost also makes itself felt), but also to a much greater extent in the Eastern tradition of thought, which completely forgot about the individual. This «innate defect» is reproduced again and again in philosophical discourse throughout European history.
Christianity with maximum force expresses the idea of the immensity of man. Man is able to contain God in himself, and in this union of man and God — in Christ — human nature does not disappear in God, does not dissolve in the Divine nature, but preserves itself. God can become man without losing Himself, and man can become God without losing himself. Man, according to the Christian faith, is not only capable of being proportionate to God (of the same size as Him), he is also immensely valuable to God: for the sake of man’s salvation, God not only became a man, but also went to suffering on the cross and death. The soul of every person is infinitely more valuable than the whole world; God sacrifices Himself for its salvation.
This Christian understanding of the status of man in the world had a decisive influence on the entire European history, it determined the shape and fundamental values of European civilization. But at the philosophical level, the message revealed in Christian revelation about the existential greatness of a person’s personality, about a special way of his being in the world, is still rarely realized in all its scale. The theme of personality is reduced now to cosmological, now to sociological problems, now to psychology, now to physiology, and any such reduction gradually shifts attention from a person’s personality to his nature, and in the intricacies of reasoning about the complex nature of a person (really, complex), any an attempt to raise the question of the ontological status of the individual.
It will be useful to briefly define the concepts. There is a difference between the «nature of man» and the «essence of man.» The “nature” of a phenomenon is its “innate” qualities: a certain specific way of its rootedness in the world, a certain character of “growth” into being from this rootedness, a certain internal alignment of this phenomenon: “internal structure and order” as a product of just such growing from these roots. The essence of a thing is “what it is”: its free openness in the truth of its being. The essence of everything that exists in the world, with the exception of man, is directly determined by the nature of this existence. The essence of any thing follows from its nature, and even if «nature loves to hide,» in the words of Heraclitus, this only means that the essence of things does not lie on the surface. The world, indeed, poses many questions for a person, but Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev is right:
Nature is a sphinx, and so it is truer
With his temptation, he destroys a person,
What, perhaps, no from the century
There is no riddle, and there was none.
The fundamental unity of the «nature» of any thing in the world and its «essence» just means the absence of this mythical «Mystery of the Universe». There are problems, there are “blank spots”, there is an infinity of knowledge, but the “mystery of being” is not about nature: “there is no mystery from the ages and never had it.”
But not so with a person. Not only is its nature complex and multi-basic, the main thing is that even from this complex nature, its essence DOES NOT DIRECTLY follow. In addition to its “purely natural” certainty, human nature also has a socio-cultural component, in addition to the qualities transmitted through the channels of natural continuity, there are also qualities transmitted by means of human culture as a “second”, artificial nature. Human nature forms a hierarchy of bodily, mental and spiritual qualities, and both channels, both natural and cultural, are always involved in their transmission to one degree or another. Mutual relations and interactions of the spirit, soul and body are also ambiguous, and it is possible to distinguish several levels in them. However, no matter how much we analyze the nature of a person (a person in general or this particular person), it is impossible to come to an understanding of his essence, to an understanding of what he truly is.
The essence of man is his — man — his own business. A “thing materializes” by its nature, and this is what its essence is reduced to. A man, on the other hand, does his own work — the work of his essence. Man makes his life, his destiny, he makes himself. What a person turns out to be in the end, what he will be in the end of his life, is up to him to decide. Every day and hour of his life a person solves this problem of finding himself, that is, the problem of finding his essence. He does this main work of his life, relying on his nature, but he freely correlates himself with this nature of his. A person can use his natural qualities, or he can not develop them, freely producing his act from her (from her, but his own), self-determining in being and freely building, thus, his essence. THE ONE WHO does this work, called the essence of a person, is his personality. None of what a person has — body, soul, spirit — neither individually, nor even everything as a whole determines, does not form a personality, which is exactly the person who has all this at his disposal. The fact that man is a person puts man in a certain sense outside the world order of being. That is, a person, of course, is included in the order of the universe, moreover, it is included, of course, as the final part of it, existing in an inextricable chain of natural necessity, but the personality of a person, figuratively speaking, is located across this chain, crossing this world vertically.
If, however, we move from these figurative expressions to the language of strict thought, then it should be said that “the vertically transverse intersection of the law-like order of the universe” means, first of all, the ontological freedom of man. Usually, when talking about freedom, people dream that “everything is possible, but nothing is for you,” but real freedom does not at all consist in the abolition of any external restrictions and internal self-control. Human freedom logically presupposes for its realization the presence of these externally limiting conditions, and it is realized precisely through internal self-control. The principle “do anything, and you won’t get anything for it”, if taken to its logical end, means that a person cannot influence his life in any way: any of his actions do not change ANYTHING in his life, do not affect his relationship in any way with the world.
Human freedom in the true sense of the word implies precisely the ability to influence the world and one’s own life in a decisive way. Freedom is inseparable from “consequences” and responsibility, and it is ensured by the absence of a rigid determination between the set of conditions that make up a certain situation and the existential choice of a person in this situation. No matter how accurate a calculation of the circumstances in which a person is placed, we may carry out, it is impossible to calculate a person’s act. Ivan Karamazov at the trial, being already not quite in himself, tells, as if for no reason, for no reason at all, either by chance or by custom: for the bride they wear a hoop with a skirt, into which she must jump in order to go to the crown, and she walks and says: «If you want to — run, if you don’t want to — don’t jump.» At every moment of the life of every person, this act of will is constantly present and always realized on a conscious or unconscious level — “If you want to — quickly, if you don’t want to — not quickly”.
Of course, a person’s behavior depends on his character. However, the calculation of a person’s act is impossible even if we take into account not only external circumstances, but also the character of a person, shaped by education. That is, even if not only the circumstances here and now are taken into account, but in general all the circumstances of a person’s life, starting from the moment of conception, then even such a calculation cannot give an unambiguous answer about the person’s forthcoming act. The fact is that education cannot be likened to programming, it is impossible to reduce the spontaneity of a person’s free choice to the uncertainty and complexity of the programmed program. Man is always and inevitably active in his own upbringing: he accepts one thing and rejects another, he greedily seeks some impressions and simply passes by others. That is, those impressions that, according to Locke, imprinted in the tabula rasa, allegedly form the entire spiritual presence of a person, are actually received by a person from the very beginning not passively, but actively. At the very least, a person «gives sanction» to the acceptance of something, and most often he himself participates in what he accepts. And, of course, in understanding this fact, reference to the natural inclinations of a person, to physical and spiritual heredity, which has an element of chance, cannot help at all. A person treats his inclinations freely: it is in his power to both develop and destroy them.
All of the above does not negate, of course, the significance of all these factors. Indeed, much depends on the inclinations of a person in who and what he will be. Indeed, education plays a huge role in the formation of a person: it is thanks to him that this formation occurs. Indeed, the circumstances in which a person finds himself here and now set a certain «field» of action, certain «rules of the game», moreover, they always put pressure on a person’s choice. Yes, all this is true, but even the demon of Laplace, who sees the whole world at once and even possesses knowledge about the movement of every particle of the world at every moment of the past, even if he had infinite computing power, could not predict with absolute certainty any human gesture. The processes taking place in the world, he, perhaps, could predict for sure, but not the act of a person. An act enters the world from the outside, from another dimension, one might say, again switching to figurative language.
The root of an act, the subject of freedom is a PERSON, present in the world, but not subordinate to the world, having the status of extraterritoriality in it. It is in this «extraterritoriality» of the personality, in the extraordinary nature of its existence, that the foundation of human freedom lies. The strength of the will, the strength of the individual may be different, but in any case, it is she — the individual — who decides: what circumstances are to be considered when choosing a line of behavior, and which are not, what possible consequences are acceptable and which are not, whether to take risks right here or not, whether to agree to a certain profit, whether to accept a certain loss, whether to sacrifice one’s life, whether to ask for alms and mercy, whether to give them, whether to climb rocks, whether to swim with the stream, whether to go through an open field, whether to live in a cell whether to spend the night in a brothel, whether to lie in a puddle.
The renunciation of freedom is also free, therefore, being a person, a person is always responsible for himself. How I will turn out in the coming moment is my business — a lot of things “happen” to people, entering their lives from the outside, but my essence is my business, and I am called to the conscious doing of this business. Refusal of work, betrayal of vocation is also an act, a person cannot have an alibi. A weak person is also a person, and he is weak only because he allowed himself to be weak. This weakness of hers has only a phenomenal, essentially fictitious character, she is always able to discover strength in herself, moreover, she draws this strength not from circumstances, and not from upbringing, and not from natural inclinations, — not from this world in general.
It is very important to note that attempts to destroy the personality in a person inevitably lead to the destruction of a person as a natural organism as well. The German fascists very purposefully experimented in concentration camps, trying to completely suppress free will in a person, and in the case when they succeeded, the result was discouraging. Losing free will, man lost any will at all. Normally, a person at every moment on the bodily, mental and spiritual level has various desires and needs that require their satisfaction. Unlike an animal that moves “along the resultant” of these desires (most often, realizing the strongest), a person has a personality that freely, based on itself, chooses which particular desire from those that have arisen at a given moment to realize right now, and which one to postpone for a while or permanently, which decides in which direction to move its existence in the given conditions.
So, in the case when it was possible to suppress this freely deciding authority in a person, desires simply ceased to arise in him at all. Man did not turn into an animal, did not live “according to the resultant” of natural needs, because needs simply died out in him. For many days, a person who had not eaten looked absolutely apathetically at the food placed in front of him, he not only did not touch it (which could be explained by a conditioned reflex), he did not even salivate (that is, unconditioned reflexes disappeared), he simply did not want to there is. An order from outside was needed for him to eat food, without this order he simply died of hunger, looking at food indifferently, a command was needed so that he would start doing at least something, he himself had no motives. The destruction of personality leads to the deepest damage to human nature. Being “not of this world”, a person is a necessary condition for the normal functioning of even “purely natural” systems in a person. A person not only is not an animal, he cannot even be turned into one — when the personality is amputated, the heart is amputated.
A clear understanding of what a person is is fundamentally necessary for any humanitarian research and constructions; without such an understanding, they degenerate and begin, in the end, to disfigure a person. Personality does not appear in a person at a certain moment of his life, a person always already has a personality. The formation of a human personality is not its “construction”, but rather an opening, similar to how a flower bud opens. The personality grows from within itself. The help that the educator can provide to her in this growth of hers lies, firstly, in ensuring freedom of growth through various types of creative activity, and secondly, in maintaining her “nourishment” through religious and moral education: to educate is nourish spiritually. Religious and moral life — this is the source from which the person draws his lifeless strength. However, it is necessary to clearly realize that participation in these spiritual spheres can have an extremely different character, and at the same time, the fundamental characteristics of the individual will be correspondingly different. The development of a clear orientation in the religious sphere is especially important both because of the limit and absoluteness of the anticipation taking place in it, and because of the opposite, sometimes diametrical, with which various religious teachings interpret the event of this anticipation and make consequences from it that are fundamental in existential self-determination. personality. A mistake here can be infinitely costly.
Anisin Andrey Leonidovich, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, b/z, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, History, Sociology and Economics of the Tyumen Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, r.t. 598-432, d.t. 306-783, b.t. 8-902-818-75-50, e-mail: [email protected]