The concept of man in Marxist philosophy. The Marxist concept of “alienation” The concept of man in Marxist philosophy
VI. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Philosophical anthropology(from the Greek anthropos - man) is a philosophical doctrine about man in all his fullness. As an independent philosophical movement of the 20th century. philosophical anthropology emerges after the work of the German philosopher Max Scheler.
Ultimately, all philosophical problems center around human problems, therefore it can be called centralphilosophical problem.
Chapter 12. THE PROBLEM OF MAN IN PHILOSOPHY
The human problem is one of the most ancient and complex. Man hides a big secret in his existence, which they have been trying to unravel for thousands of years.
In ancient times, the inner world of a person was compared with the Universe, calling a person a microcosm.
Currently, the human problem is classified as a complex problem that is solved by a system of various sciences and scientific means.
Philosophy occupies a special place in this system; it is designed to find answers to the following questions:
What is the nature of man and his essence?
What is the meaning and purpose of human existence?
What are the prospects for human development?
In the 20th century The most popular philosophical concepts of man were: Marxist, Freudian and existentialist.
12.1. Marxist concept of man
Marxist concept man began to take shape in the second half of the 19th century. in the works Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels, which came from labor theory of anthroposociogenesis. The problem of the nature (origin) of man was solved on the basis Darwin's theory of evolution and ideas about the natural-historical process of human formation in an emerging society. The emergence of human consciousness occurred on the basis of labor activity and in connection with the development of language (see in the book: F. Engels “Dialectics of Nature”, article “The Role of Labor in the Process of Transformation of Ape into Man”).
The basic concepts of the Marxist concept of man include: “person”, “individual”, “personality”, “individuality”.
Human - this is the generic name of a thinking being (Homo sapiens - reasonable man). This concept indicates the differences between a person and an animal: the presence of consciousness, the possession of articulate speech (language), the manufacture of tools, responsibility for one’s actions, etc.
The man has biosocial nature, because, on the one hand, it came out of the animal world, on the other hand, it was formed in society; it has a biological, bodily organization and a social (public) essence.
K. Marx in his work “Theses on Feuerbach” he said: “...The essence of man is not an abstract,... it is the totality of all social relations."
WITH From the point of view of Marxism, social traits are dominant in a person, not biological; consciousness is dominant, not the unconscious.
Individual - this is a person as a single representative of the human race. This concept does not include the features of real human life.
Personality - this is a specific person with his inherent social and individual traits.
The character of an individual is mainly determined by the social environment: what society is like, so is the personality.
Individuality - These are those specific features that are inherent in a given person that distinguish him from other people.
In Soviet philosophy, the activity-based approach to understanding the human personality became widespread (psychologist/1 N. Leontyev and others).
The essence of this approach lies in the fact that personality is formed and manifested in various spheres and activities: material and production, socio-political, spiritual, etc. Social activity is a general, universal sign of personality. The wealth of a personality appears as the wealth of its actual relationships. Under the conditions of a totalitarian system, the Marxist theory of man encountered the contradictions of real socialism.
The social ideal of Marxism is a communist society in which “the free development of everyone is a condition for the free development of all.” The goal of this society: the removal of all forms of alienation of a person, the emancipation of his essential forces, maximum self-realization of a person, the comprehensive harmonious development of a person’s abilities for the benefit of the whole society (K. Marx).
The restructuring of Soviet society led to the abandonment of the Marxist concept of man as a state doctrine.
Marxist philosophy presents the original concept of man. According to Marx, a person not only lives, feels, experiences, exists, but, first of all, realizes his strengths and abilities in an existence specific to him - in production activity, in labor. He is what society is like, which allows him to work in a certain way and conduct production activities. Man is distinguished by his social essence.
The concept “man” is used to characterize the universal qualities and abilities inherent in all people. Using this concept, Marxist philosophy seeks to emphasize that there is such a special historically developing community as the human race, humanity, which differs from all other material systems only in its inherent way of life.
Marxist philosophy proposes to reveal the essence of man not only as a natural biological being, but also on the basis of the concept of the social, practical, active essence of man.
From the point of view of this concept, man stood out from the animal world thanks to work. Marxist anthropology defines the beginning of such a distinction as the beginning of man's production of tools. However, this point of view needs clarification. The fact is that animals already exhibit elements of labor activity, and initial forms of making primitive tools take place. But they are used to support and as an auxiliary means of animal life. In essence, this method, based on a system of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes and instincts, can be considered a prerequisite for the transition from animal to human, but they cannot yet be considered as a human principle.
Thus, it is possible to formulate such a synthetic characteristic of a person.
Man is an animal, a corporeal being, whose life activity is based on material production. carried out in the system of social relations, a process of conscious, purposeful, transformative influence on the world and on the person himself to ensure his existence, functioning, and development.
So, Marxist philosophy affirms the existence of man as a unique material reality. But at the same time he notes that humanity as such does not exist. There are separate representatives - “individuals”.
An individual is a single representative of the human race, a specific bearer of all the psychophysiological and social traits of humanity: reason, will, needs, interests, etc.
Personality is the result of the development of an individual, the most complete embodiment of human qualities.
The use of the concepts of “individual” and “personality” in this context allows Marxist anthropology to apply a historical approach to the study of man, his nature, to consider both an individual person and humanity as a whole.
A similar process occurs in individual human development. Initially, a child is simply a biological being, a bundle of biomass, instincts and reflexes. But as he develops and assimilates social experience, the experience of humanity, he gradually turns into a human personality.
But Marxist philosophy makes a distinction between the individual and the personality not only in terms of human evolutionary development, but also as special types of human sociality.
An individual is a mass creature, that is, a person who is the bearer of stereotypes of mass consciousness and mass culture. A person who does not want and cannot stand out from the general mass of people, who does not have his own opinion, his own position. This type was dominant at the dawn of humanity, but is also widespread in modern society.
The concept of “personality” as a special social type is most often used as the opposite in its main characteristics to the concept of “individual”. A person is an autonomous person capable of opposing himself to society. Personal independence is associated with the ability to control oneself, and this, in turn, presupposes that the individual has not just consciousness, that is, thinking and will, but also self-awareness, that is, introspection, self-esteem, and self-control over one’s behavior. The self-awareness of an individual, as it develops, is transformed into a life position based on ideological attitudes and life experience.
The way to realize a life position is social activity, which is a process and a way of self-realization by a person of his essence
Marxist philosophy society
BULLETIN OF PERM UNIVERSITY
2016 Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology Issue 4 (28)
DOI: 10.17072/2078-7898/2016-4-14-21
THE CONCEPT OF MAN IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF K. MARX: THE EXPERIENCE OF RECONSTRUCTION
Ustinov Oleg Alexandrovich
Academy for Advanced Training and Professional Retraining of Education Workers
The article examines the issue of anthropological problems in the philosophy of K. Marx as the central theme of all his ideological and theoretical quests. In the early period of his work, K. Marx was seriously interested in the anthropological ideas of his predecessors I.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, L. Feuerbach and others, but quite soon abandoned historical and philosophical reflection and began to develop an independent political and socio-economic project in which these anthropological ideas were to be implemented in practice. This led to K. Marx’s definition of his philosophy as “practical materialism.” That is why the founder of the world communist movement, for the first time in the history of philosophical thought, was able to consider the issues of the formation and development of a “whole person”, his self-realization, the problems of relationships between the individual and the collective, happiness, creativity and others on rich social material. However, the scale of the tasks posed by K. Marx did not allow him to create a complete philosophical system. The result of this incompleteness was the loss of semantic keys to the legacy of the “first Marxist,” which was interpreted by his followers as an exclusively political and socio-economic project. This circumstance became the main reason for the attempts of Western and domestic researchers to reconstruct the anthropological concept of K. Marx with a detailed analysis of its ideological origins, evolution and historical fate. The experience of such reconstruction is also proposed in this article.
Key words: subjective factor in history, alienation, practice, K. Marx, “whole man”, class struggle, proletariat, revolution, communism.
THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL MARX: THE EXPERIENCE OF RECONSTRUCTION
Academy of Advanced Training and Professional Retraining Of Education Specialists
The article discusses the anthropological issues in the philosophy of Karl Marx as a central theme of all his ideological and theoretical pursuits. In the early period of his work Marx was seriously keen in anthropological ideas of his predecessors J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, L. Feuerbach, and others, but pretty soon abandoned the historical and philosophical reflection, and began to develop an independent political and socio-economic project in which these anthropological ideas were to be implemented in practice. There followed Marx's definition of his philosophy as “practical materialism”. That is why the founder of the world communist movement for the first time in the history of philosophical thought could consider questions of formation and development of the “whole man”, his self-realization, the problems of the individual and collective relationships, happiness, creativity, and the other on the rich social material. However, the magnitude of the tasks set by K. Marx, did not allow him to create a complete philosophical system. The result of this was the loss of the sense of incompleteness of the keys to the legacy of the “first Marxist”, which was interpreted by his followers as an exclusively political and socio-economic project. Western and domestic researchers to reconstruct Marx's anthropological concept with a detailed analysis of its mental origins, evolution and historical destiny. The experience of such reconstruction propose in this article.
Keywords: the subjective factor in history, alienation, practice, Karl Marx, the concept of “whole man”, class struggle, revolution, communism.
© Ustinov O.A., 2016
O.A. Ustinov
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), German philosopher, economist, political journalist, and public figure, was repeatedly recognized as “the greatest thinker in history” over the past century. It is difficult to disagree with this statement. Even taking into account the huge critical literature addressed to the teachings of K. Marx, it cannot be denied that it was the author of the “Communist Manifesto” and “Capital” who managed to create a system of thought that largely determined the development of ideas in the 20th-21st centuries.
However, for the vast majority of researchers, including his supporters, K. Marx for a long time remained primarily the founding father of “political economy” - a social science, the subject of which is the study of production relations and the laws that govern them. Only in the middle of the 20th century. Works began to appear in the literature on the philosophical origins of K. Marx’s economic concept, revealing him as a thinker of the anthropological direction. The most famous reconstruction was carried out by the Western Marxist philosopher E. Fromm. But no less interesting and profound in this regard were the studies of a number of Soviet historians of philosophy devoted to the discovery of the “unknown Marx.” This article makes another attempt to analyze the legacy of the founder of Marxism in the context of his views on the problem of man in order to generalize and clarify the material accumulated on this topic.
It is well known that Marxist philosophy was the successor to German classical philosophy of the 19th century, which, following the humanistic calls of the English and French Enlightenment, proclaimed man “the most important subject in the world.” Philosophical and anthropological ideas in the works of I. Kant, I.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, G.V.F. Hegel, L. Feuerbach had a serious influence on the formation of K. Marx’s worldview. Already in his first works, problems of human individuality, social harmony, purpose and meaning of life occupied a central place. K. Marx associated his philosophical position with the “philosophy of self-consciousness” that arose in the ancient world (Epicureanism, Stoicism, skepticism), which rejected all heavenly and earthly gods and recognized human self-consciousness as the highest deity. The young thinker was organically disgusted by the personification of objective natural and social laws in the image of certain supernatural forces, and from the very beginning he rejected the religious concept of the world. This is the entire show
This was also shared by K. Marx’s close friend F. Engels, who became his co-author.
In the 1840s. The main and most important direction of K. Marx’s search was the discovery of a view of man as a socio-historical, practically active subject of history. K. Marx believed that the “essential forces of man” presuppose the presence of a special kind of objectivity - social objectivity. It was this aspect, as the main argument in favor of the revolutionary transformation of the world, that was most important for him in his polemics with G.F.V. Hegel and L. Feirbach. K. Marx started from what he borrowed from G.W.F. Hegel’s analysis of practice as an activity not only for the production of objects, but also of people themselves: man historically develops precisely in the process of practical development of the world. However, K. Marx was not satisfied with the fact that the essence of man was idealistically portrayed by G.V.F. Hegel as a spiritual property, identical with self-consciousness and locked in a certain intellectual abstraction. K. Marx contrasted this interpretation of human essence with the rehabilitation of a specific natural man performed by L. Feuerbach. However, the biological interpretation of human essence by L. Feuerbach also did not suit K. Marx, since man, understood in it only as a part of nature, lost his subjectivity and turned into a passive object of history. Man, “liberated” from the influence of supernatural power, was doomed here to hopeless slavish dependence on nature.
Marx’s interpretation of human essence synthesized the solutions of G.V.F. Hegel and L. Feuerbach by including the fact of material production in the scope of analysis, as a result of which the idea of the historical formation of man in the process of practice acquired a fundamentally new meaning. By producing the objects necessary for himself, a person produces himself, acquires and develops specifically human activity, which is concretized in the ability to perceive and transform objective reality. He emphasized that essential human properties, starting with the formation of the five external senses, are a product of history, human self-development, and not a gift of nature, as L. Feuerbach argued. K. Marx considered the presence of material production, the “established objective existence of industry” as “an open book of human essential forces”, the result and evidence of essential human activity. He placed special emphasis on the collective nature of subject-transformative practice, pointing out that consciousness and language are formed only in joint work and associated communication, that is, specifically human subjectivity is manifested
is a socio-historical product. K. Marx showed that people acquire the ability to transform the world in the process of assimilating social experience, being both products and subjects of socio-historical activity.
The result of K. Marx's thoughts was the philosophical justification of human social activity as the only form of transformation by him of himself, society and nature. It is no coincidence that he called his teaching, in contrast to the contemplative materialism of L. Feuerbach, “practical materialism.” “History doesn't do anything... it doesn't fight any battles! It is not history, but precisely man, a living real person - that is who does everything, possesses everything and fights for everything. History is nothing more than the activity of a person pursuing his goals.” K. Marx recognized that people make history under certain circumstances, which are found in a ready-made form and on which they completely depend, but pointed out that people have the ability to master and transform these circumstances through their knowledge: “Circumstances create people in the same way, in what circumstances people create." At the same time, the objective freedom of man is directly linked in the works of K. Marx with objective knowledge of reality and consists in choosing an action in accordance with existing conditions. K. Marx was a resolute opponent of the revaluation of the subjective factor in history, considering it fruitless, as it appeared in the works of I.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, and at the same time dangerous, as it became in concrete social practice. Thus, K. Marx had a negative attitude towards experiments on nature, based on the conviction of impunity for human tyranny. The essence of K. Marx’s “practical materialism” was concretized in the formula “freedom is a recognized necessity.” This was a real philosophical revolution: for the first time in European philosophy, man was conceptualized as a socio-historical, practically active subject of history.
K. Marx paid great attention to such problems as essence and existence, alienation, the purpose of man and the meaning of his life. Here the philosophical and ethical concept of L. Feuerbach played a decisive role in the formation of his view. L. Feuerbach viewed man as a moral being, whose essential qualities are manifested in love for another person. He emphasized that a child becomes human only when he begins to love. He associated morality with the inherent desire for happiness and the understanding of the impossibility of achieving it.
life outside of cordial communication with other people. Agreeing with the initial statements of L. Feirbach, K. Marx deepened them with arguments of materialist theory. Man, being initially a biological being, is socialized in the process of historical development and becomes aware of those socially useful qualities that distinguish him from animals precisely as humans. He acquires the ability to control and suppress the negative manifestations of his “animal” nature (aggression, thirst for dominance, egocentrism, etc.). K. Marx believed that L. Feirbach agreed that a person cannot become happy by ignoring cordial communication with other people. Love is exchanged only for love, trust is exchanged only for trust. Forcing love (for example, acquiring it for money) does not bring true joy and turns into misfortune for a spiritually poor person, who experiences an even more acute painful need “for that greatest wealth that is another person.” K. Marx considered the moral attitude of man to man to be an expression of the highest degree of socialization of the individual, his human self-awareness.
Another issue that worried K. Marx was the problem of aesthetic sensuality - “human taste for nature” as “a natural feeling of man.” K. Marx believed that initially the process of material exchange between society and nature was expressed in the satisfaction of natural needs. However, in the process of producing more and more perfect things, man acquired an understanding of the “laws of beauty”. Satisfaction of natural needs turned into sensual pleasure and was transferred from the “animal” to a specifically “human” level. According to K. Marx, natural needs, including physical love, do not have the meaning of an end in themselves for a person and, being cultivated, are perceived as manifestations of human beauty, part of the comprehensive living of life. “At the center of the Marxist understanding of human relations we see not sexuality, but Eros, one of the expressions of which can be sexuality” (E. Fromm). The transformation of sexuality into Eros is the “humanization” of natural needs, giving them an aesthetic and moral character that is natural for humans. K. Marx considered the emotional “appropriation” of the external world by a person and the development of his inner world as a result of this world as a condition for a full and happy life. The true wealth of a person in the understanding of K. Marx was the wealth of all his human feelings and perceptions.
K. Marx believed that the desire for creative self-expression and self-realization is the essential desire of every person, it has prerequisites in the form of “inclinations and abilities” and in a conscious state “appears as an internal necessity, as a need.” By creating an object for himself and other people, a person asserts himself in the object and realizes his individuality, realizes himself as a person and, in connection with this, experiences special sensual pleasure. It is characteristic that K. Marx considered creative self-expression as necessary for human development and specifically stipulated that it does not have a close connection with achievements in art: “If /.../ every individual were an excellent painter, this would not at all exclude opportunity for everyone to also be an original painter.” . According to K. Marx, the free and independent creative activity of a person together with other people and for the common good is the main condition for a “holistic” human existence, ultimately the essential purpose of a person and the meaning of his life.
Thus, K. Marx, like L. Feuerbach, proceeded from the understanding of man as a thinking, creative and social being and formulated the ideal of a “whole person”, the quintessence of whose essential properties is an aesthetic and moral attitude towards the world, another person and oneself. But, according to K. Marx, these essential properties of a person are formed only in the process of social development: “. the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in an individual. In its reality, it is the totality of all social relations."
But how did it happen that modern man is alienated from his original human essence and drags out a flawed existence? K. Marx came to the conclusion that this alienation has an economic basis; it is associated with a person’s separation from creative self-realization in the process of material production. With the emergence of private property and the division of labor, an antagonism of society occurs: one person becomes dependent on another person and is deprived of the right to free creative activity, classes are formed, in a capitalist society - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Forced labor is perceived by the worker as a flawed form of existence, during which “he feels cut off from himself.” He increasingly loses his human “spiritual essence” and in the reverse order turns into an animal. The only satisfaction of physiological needs freely available to him is “for eating, drinking,
sexual intercourse" becomes for him identical with human existence itself. As a result of this, the worker experiences an aesthetic and moral loss of himself as a human being. By appropriating the labor of others, the capitalist also suffers from the division of labor and is also dehumanized, despite the fact that his life and position in society are incomparably better than the life and position of the worker in it. The desire to accumulate capital made him insensitive, perceiving the world only through the prism of utility and gross material appropriation. He needs to possess the object and consume it - eat, drink, wear it, live in it in order to feel it as his own; he has also lost his natural human perception of the world. In the alienated state of man, K. Marx saw, in the words of E. Fromm, “the pathology of normality, the depravity of a statistically normal person. The loss /.../ of everything he should have been.” . The natural result of the alienation of man from labor is the alienation of man from man, the formation of a “surrogate collectivity”. It is expressed in the fact that truly human relations are replaced by dehumanized economic relations, according to which “the product is everything, people are nothing.” Bourgeois society, as conceived by K. Marx, is a deeply perverted dehumanized world, a “topsy-turvy world,” in which man is viewed as a social means and not an end in itself. Based on works on classical political economy (A. Smith, D. Ricardo, etc.), K. Marx stated that the anthropological ideal of a society based on private property is a primitive “economic man”: “an ascetic, but miser engaged in usury, and an ascetic but productive slave." In it there is no concept of a person outside of his role in production, as a result of which, instead of people, it presents personalized economic categories - “capitalists” and “workers”.
K. Marx saw a way out of this situation in the “complete emancipation of all human feelings and properties” through the creation of a communist “real collectivity” based on the elimination of all forms of forced labor and the establishment of the principle of creative initiative. K. Marx considered the abolition of private property to be the main and necessary condition for eliminating the compulsion of people to work. Let us note that in the understanding of K. Marx, genuine communism is a society in which there is a “genuine appropriation of human essence by man and for man.” K. Marx saw a direct analogy
between the philosophical and ethical theory of L. Feuerbach and contemporary communist teachings. In the concept of K. Marx, the idea of communism was precisely given a philosophical and anthropological justification.
According to K. Marx, a social revolution organized by the proletariat must overthrow dehumanized social relations. The proletariat is the most oppressed class, whose “spiritual and physical poverty” cannot but give rise to human protest. The basis of the proletarian revolution, according to K. Marx, is “the contradiction between its (the proletariat. - O.U.) human nature and its position in life, which is a frank, decisive and comprehensive denial of this very nature.” By the very course of history, the proletariat is forced to establish its human dictatorship over society, within the framework of which it expropriates private property, eliminates the division of labor and abolishes classes. K. Marx emphasized that the interests of the proletariat coincide with the interests of all humanity: “By its principle, communism stands above the enmity between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”
The actions of the proletariat were to be led by the communist workers' party, led, apparently, by “bourgeois ideologists” who had risen “to a theoretical understanding of the entire course of the historical movement” and were helping the proletariat acquire human consciousness (precisely such “bourgeois ideologists” were K. Marx and F. Engels - founders of the Union of Communists - the first international communist organization of the proletariat). K. Marx pointed out that the activity of communists is strictly limited by the objective socio-economic situation, it is its “general expression” and in no case is of a voluntaristic nature. He believed that an objective and comprehensive transformation of human essence is possible only together with an objective transformation of all social conditions, which no communist party can specifically “cause.” In this regard, K. Marx had a sharply negative attitude towards the “renovators of the world” who use society as material for their social experiments. He considered the universal development of productive forces to be a prerequisite for the formation of a communist society, on the basis of which the universal development of human communication would be possible. K. Marx emphasized that the liquidation of private property is identical to its actual withering away, the complete exhaustion of its positive historical content. He stated that attempts to “establish” commune
nism, ignoring the lack of objective prerequisites, lead to the formation of “crude communism”, based on a primitive universal equation and the extension of the flawed category of “worker” to all people. The elimination of alienation under communism in the course of comprehensive and systematic control over production should have become, in K. Marx’s view, a triumph of self-awareness and self-organization of man as a practically active subject of history.
All of the above statements by K. Marx are the result of historical and philosophical reconstruction. In his early works one can find individual philosophical and anthropological ideas, but the system of anthropological philosophy is absent from them. Why did K. Marx shy away from developing a holistic doctrine of man, if this topic was really so significant in his understanding?
Apparently, from the very beginning, K. Marx set as his task the development of some kind of practical “application” to the philosophical anthropology of L. Feuerbach. In other words, he completely agreed with the ethical guidelines of L. Feuerbach and, not considering it necessary to multiply the “talks” about humanism, supplemented them with historical-materialist examples and began searching for an answer to the question of how to concretely implement these ethical guidelines in a capitalist society, to transform the good wish into a social norm. “.For practical materialists, i.e. For communists, the whole point is to revolutionize the existing world, to practically oppose the existing state of things and change it." The main content of K. Marx’s theory was built on this and this was also its originality. It is no coincidence that K. Marx considered his scientific discovery the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a historically inevitable form of transition from a class society to a society without classes.
Since the late 1840s. and until the end of his days, K. Marx focused entirely on the political-economic analysis of social history with the goal of creating a strictly scientific program for the “humanization” of the world. K. Marx briefly dwelled on the problems of the formation of man as an individual, his fate in a capitalist society and the prospects for development under communism, but his comments about man were now practically indistinguishable in a large-scale analysis of the capitalist economy. References to the ideal of a “comprehensively developed individual” were only occasionally found in the works of K. Marx (for example, “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) and “Capital. Critique of Political Economy”). K. Marx is nothing anymore
did not talk about human animality, the sensory world of man, completely focusing on the analysis of the capitalist economy and its destructive influence on the worker. The specifics of the study led to the modification of key terms (“mode of production” instead of “human production”, “productive forces” instead of “essential human forces”, “exploitation” and “division of labor” instead of “alienation”). K. Marx investigated the problem of surplus value and revealed the real mechanism of alienation: the worker produces a product, the capitalist returns part of this product to him in the form of wages, the worker always produces more than he receives from the capitalist. The analysis of economic alienation was complemented by an analysis of the capitalist use of machines of which the worker becomes a part. A special place was given to the theory of commodity fetishism, which concretized the problem of alienation of human relations, their narrow economic inhuman nature.
Mature Marxism was a scientific study of the economic development of society - production relations, division of labor, class formation, productive forces, class struggle, socio-economic formations. T.I. Oizerman writes: “Marx’s Capital, like the works of mature Marxism in general, is incomparably more meaningful, more scientific, more demonstrative justification and development of humanism than his earlier works, despite the fact that the term “humanism” appears in Capital "less frequently than in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844." However, an adequate interpretation of the Marxist concept of man, due to its unspoken nature, was greatly hampered by the details of political economic analysis. K. Marx's later works, especially Capital, created a fundamentally incorrect idea of the Marxist concept as a purely economic concept, unrelated to philosophical anthropology. They could be adequately understood with the help of the early works of K. Marx, but they were not published and lay in the archive.
The specificity of political economic research also determined the apparent disappearance of the principle of human creative activism from mature Marxism. K. Marx sought to establish the objective causes of the crisis of the capitalist economy and outline the prospects for the world socialist revolution. In this regard, in the dialectic of productive forces and production relations, the contradictions between which, as K. Marx wrote, inevitably lead to the change of one socio-economic formation to another, the role of people as the main production was almost indistinguishable.
body strength. The search for objective-deterministic prerequisites for the creation of a new society had by that time become the “idefix” of K. Marx, on which his utopian dream of a global transformation of the world depended. He emphasized that the true “kingdom of freedom” can only be achieved as a result of the universal development of the productive forces, as a result of which the working day will gradually be shortened and time will be freed up for individual personal development. Of course, the emphasis on the economic factor in history did not detract from his understanding of the role of the subjective factor in it. Thus, in Capital, K. Marx approvingly quoted the words of J. Bellers: “. labor adds oil to the lamp of life, and thought lights it... ". Conditioned by the state of the productive forces, the transition from capitalism to communism does not exclude, but, on the contrary, requires active conscious actions from man as a subject of history. But this idea was not spelled out with sufficient clarity. As a result, it turned out that in the works of K. Marx, despite all his plans, the problem of man as a socio-historical subject, as A. G. Myslivchenko correctly noted, did not receive conceptual development. And European socialists quite predictably perceived the philosophical and anthropological teaching developed by K. Marx as a theory of economic determinism, because it was possible to see the original seeds of high humanity within the legacy of K. Marx only through the most complex reconstruction. The “greatest thinker” of the 19th century simply did not have enough life span to realize his grandiose scientific tasks and create a systematized and coherent teaching about the world, society and man. It seems that the comprehension and further development of K. Marx’s discoveries is still ahead.
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The date of the manuscript receipt 04/04/2016
Ustinov Oleg Alexandrovich
Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education and Science
Academy of Advanced Training and Professional Retraining of Education Workers, 125212, Moscow, Golovinskoye sh., 8/2a; e-mail: [email protected]
About the author
Ustinov Oleg Alexandrovich
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education and Science
Academy of Advanced Training and Professional Retraining of Education Specialists, 8/2a, Golovinskoe hwy., Moscow, 125212, Russia; e-mail: [email protected]
Please cite this article in Russian-language sources as follows:
Ustinov O.A. The concept of man in the philosophy of K. Marx: experience of reconstruction // Bulletin of Perm University. Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology. 2016. Issue. 4(28). pp. 14-21. doi: 10.17072/2078-7898/2016-4-14-21
Please cite this article in English as:
Ustinov O.A. The concept of human in the philosophy of Karl Marx: the experience of reconstruction // Perm University Herald. Series “Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology". 2016. Iss. 4(28). P. 14-21. doi: 10.17072/2078-7898/2016-4-14-21
K. Marx(1818-1883) subjected this view to critical analysis; he attributes egalitarian communism to private property education. Such communism, he said, is “universal private property.”
One of the first steps of Marxism was to identify the process of dehumanization of what is happening in capitalist society. Young Marx raises and resolves questions about the reasons for a person’s alienation from society and about ways to overcome them, about restoring a person’s dignity, realizing his interests, and the conditions for his free, comprehensive development. In the philosophy of Marxism, a person is considered as a subject of social relations, as a bearer and organizer of relations in society. And since society is a way of human existence, his activity is determined by the “architecture” of social reality. Through social structures, the contours of human existence are outlined; analysis of society allows us to understand man as the core of the socio-historical process. All social relationships are human relationships. In the system of social relations, a person is a kind of node to which the threads of diverse social relationships converge, i.e. man represents the individual being of social relations. At the same time, under capitalism, the priority becomes not the individual, but society. The characterization of a person as a product of his social connections and relationships logically translates into the fact that he becomes something secondary in relation to society. This position, on the one hand, is quite fair, since a person only becomes a person when he enters into numerous and multiplying connections over time, first with his family, then with his peers, and becomes a member of societies: nations, states, etc. On the other hand, this same position carries one-sidedness, since the socialization of a person, inclusion without remainder in social connections and relationships leads to the loss of his personal individuality. It turns out that man is not primary, but arbitrary, secondary in relation to society. As a result, the person himself, his uniqueness, is lost.
The most complete concept of man Marx analyzed E. Fromm, he notes that the most common misconception in Marx's view of man is the idea of materialism, according to which Marx allegedly considered the main motive of human activity to be the desire for material gain. Actually the main idea Marx- this is the liberation of man from economic dependence, the restoration of human integrity, his unity with nature and other people. Marx's philosophy can be called spiritual existentialism. Fromm notes that the word materialism has Marx means the mental motivation of behavior and characterizes the philosophical direction that believes that the world is based on moving matter (from the point of view of idealism, the universe is determined by ideas). Exploring a person Marx comes from a real person, the economic, social conditions of his life, the conditions that determine the method of production, which means that social organization determines the person himself.
Marx distinguishes between constant, stable human needs that persist under any circumstances: food, drink, procreation. He believes that man himself is the creator of his history, and if at the beginning of history he blindly obeys nature, then as he evolves, man changes his attitude towards nature and at the same time changes himself. Moreover, the most important thing, according to Marx, is labor in the process of which a person regulates his relationship with nature.
Method of production, considers Marx, determines the social, political, spiritual processes of life. Development occurs as a result of the emergence of contradictions between the productive forces and the existing social system. If social organization and the method of production impede the development of productive forces, then society, under the threat of decline, chooses a mode of production that corresponds to the new productive forces. Marx believed that a person is a product of circumstances and upbringing, and human improvement is the result of their changes. He believed that a person should be considered not only from a biological, anatomical, physiological, but also from a psychological perspective. Marx draws a line between “human nature in general” and the modification of man manifested in every era. He believed that man is a raw material that cannot be changed in terms of its structure, but which changes psychologically in the course of history (“History is the history of man’s self-realization, his self-expression in the process of labor and production”). The entire so-called world history is nothing more than the creation of man by human labor, the formation of nature for man.
Marx believed that neither money, nor power, nor sensual pleasure gives a person an understanding of the meaning of life, only creative activity allows a person to enjoy life. “A creative person is such when he behaves not as a passive recipient, but as an active producer who acts in relation to the world as an individual.” A person lives while he creates. For Marx a person is characterized by the principle of activity as attraction, tension, as a vital spirit. It is in work that a person realizes his individuality, his physical and mental strength.
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen- utopian socialists of the beginning XIX V. - created a new direction of utopian socialism and communism, overcoming ideas about general asceticism and egalitarianism, depicted the future society as a society of abundance, ensuring the satisfaction of human needs. The well-being of society, in their opinion, completely depends on the correct distribution of material and spiritual benefits, mainly material ones. A significant place in their reasoning was occupied by questions of determining the reasonableness of human needs. Those needs were considered reasonable, the satisfaction of which ensures a person’s physical existence, working capacity and procreation. Needs are reasonable if they are free from excesses and do not pretend to be luxury goods.
In the history of Russian philosophy two directions concerning man can be distinguished: the materialist teachings of revolutionary democrats ( Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky etc.) and the concepts of representatives of religious philosophy ( Dostoevsky, Vl. Soloviev, Berdyaev and others.) In the development of philosophical views V.G. Belinsky the human problem gradually becomes of paramount importance. In a letter to V.P. Botkin dated March 1, 1841, he notes that “... the fate of the subject, individual, personality is more important than the fate of the whole world” ( Belinsky V. G. Complete works.t. 12. M., 1956. p. 22). At the same time, he connects the achievement of individual freedom and independence with social transformations, arguing that they are possible only in a society based on truth and valor. Justifying the need for personal development leads Belinsky to criticize capitalism and religion and defend the ideas of utopian socialism and atheism.
He wrote about the need to liberate the working man A.I. Herzen. His anthropology is rationalistic; man emerged from the “animal sleep” thanks to reason. Herzen believed that a person’s personality “is created by the environment and events, but events are carried out by individuals and bear their stamp; there is interaction here" (Herzen L.I. Selected philosophical works. T. 2. M., 1948. p. 314). Representatives of “peasant socialism” A.I. Herzen and N.P. Ogarev recognized communities (communes) as the cornerstone building of a new society, hoping that through them the peasant would be able to fulfill his needs and interests: everyone’s right to land, communal ownership of it, secular management.
In the work “Anthropological principle in philosophy” N.G. Chernyshevsky shows the natural-monistic essence of man. Man is the highest product of nature. His views were influenced by the teachings of Feuerbach, although he introduces social aspects of existence into his teaching about man, in particular, he connects the solution to the problem of man with the transformation of society on a socialist basis. In the works N.G. Chernyshevsky theoretical problems of needs received fundamental development. He shared the anthropological views of L. Feuerbach, considered the main motivation of human actions to be the desire for pleasure, for something pleasant, and “material interests” were the most important driving forces of social life. He derived the variety of social phenomena from the material interests and needs of individuals. He considered various spiritual needs to be the highest aspirations of man. He considered it necessary to have a harmonious combination of material and spiritual needs, which, in his opinion, is possible in a just society. Chernyshevsky assumed that social conditions shape people, their interests and needs. In his opinion, people have innate mutual goodwill, but everyone wants to satisfy their own needs first of all. Achieving proportionality between needs and the means of satisfying them is possible as a result of changing the size and importance of different human needs. With the development of enlightenment, the weaknesses and vices born of the distortion of our nature will weaken.
Developed Chernyshevsky The theory of new morality was called the ethics of “reasonable egoism.” Its main principle was that a person’s actions must be strictly consistent with his inner motives. “Reasonable egoism” is the morality of the individual, harmoniously connecting personal and social needs.
M.V. Lomonosov In his scientific works, he devoted significant attention to the issues of growth of Russia's productive forces, advocated the rise of the people's well-being, and called for taking care, first of all, of the urgent needs of the broad masses of the people.
Radishchev interpreted the problem of needs based on commodity-money relations. He emphasized such properties of a product as the ability to satisfy people's needs and make a profit. He paid great attention to improving the financial situation of the people by satisfying their basic needs. He considered the main thing to be the destruction of serfdom, the confiscation of land from landowners, and its transfer to the peasants.
One of the theorists of Decembrism N.I. Turgenev believed that only in conditions of free enterprise is it possible to most fully satisfy the needs of all segments of society.
In the concepts of Russian religious philosophers, anthropological issues occupy a central place. This especially applies to the period of development of Russian philosophy, starting with F.M. Dostoevsky- an existential thinker. The basis of the teaching about man in this direction is the question of the nature and essence of man. Its solution is often seen along the path of dualism of soul and body, freedom and necessity, good and uia, divine and earthly. Anthropological views Dostoevsky are based on the premise that a person in his deepest essence contains two polar principles - God and the devil, good and evil, which manifest themselves especially strongly when a person is released. This tragic contradiction of two principles in man lies at the basis of philosophical anthropology V. Solovyova. “Man,” he writes, “combines in himself all sorts of opposites, which all boil down to one great opposition between the unconditional and the conditional, between the absolute and eternal essence and the transitory phenomenon or appearance. Man is both a deity and a nonentity" ( Soloviev B.S. Collection cit.: in 10 volumes. T. 3. St. Petersburg, 1911. p. 121). To no lesser extent the problem of soul and body is reflected in philosophy ON THE. Berdyaev: “Man is a microcosm and microtheos. He was created in the image and likeness of God. But at the same time, man is a natural and limited being. There is duality in man: man is the intersection of two worlds, he reflects in himself the higher world and the lower world... As a carnal being, he is connected with the entire cycle of world life, as a spiritual being, he is connected with the spiritual world and with God" ( Berdyaev N.A. About Russian philosophy. Part 1. M., 1991. p. 20-21). Due to this initial division and dualism of man, his fate turns out to be tragic in its very essence. As a spiritual being, man is free, but as a natural phenomenon he is limited by his material shell, physical, carnal existence. “The whole tragedy of life,” writes Berdyaev, - comes from the collision of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, from the discrepancy between man as a spiritual being and man as a natural being living in the natural world" ( Berdyaev N.A. Destiny of Russia. M., 1990. p. 328-329). However, from the point of view of representatives of this direction, the significance of the spiritual and natural principles in a person is not the same. The main thing for a person is the spiritual, Divine substance, and the true meaning of a person and his existence lies in connecting a person with God. In Russian religious philosophy, the question about man organically turns into a Divine question, and the question about God into a human one. Man reveals his true essence in God, and God manifests himself in man. Hence one of the central problems of this direction is the problem of the God-man, or superman. Unlike the concept of Nietzsche, for whom the superman is a man-god, in Russian philosophy the superman is a god-man. Her anthropology is of a purely humanistic nature, asserting the superiority of good over evil and God over the devil.
Test questions and assignments
1. Define the concept of “serviceology”.
2. What is the object and subject of study of service science?
3. Describe the views on man and his needs in ancient Indian philosophy.
4. Tell us about the views of the philosophers of Ancient China on man and his needs.
5. Describe the views on man and his needs in ancient Greece. Highlight the approaches to understanding man and his needs in the Middle Ages.
6. Reveal the approaches of philosophical anthropology of the New Age to understanding man and his needs.
7. Describe the views of bourgeois classical political economy on human needs.
9.Tell us about the approaches of German classical philosophy to man and his needs.
10.Characterize the approaches to the problem of needs in the theories of utopian socialism.
11.What is the essence of the anthropological concept of Marxism?
12. Describe the views on man and his needs in the history of Russian philosophy.
The question of man is considered in Marxist philosophy in an emphatically academic manner and acquires some shades of drama only in connection with addressing the problem of social reorganization of society. Attention is primarily focused on the origin and essence of consciousness, which makes it possible to clearly show the role of matter as primary and consciousness as secondary, thereby demonstrating loyalty to the principle of materialistic monism.
The concept of reflection. In Lenin's work “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1908), reflection is mentioned several times as a property inherent in all material objects and processes. Thus, polemicizing with Pearson, whose views on the issue of consciousness were close to Berkeley’s position, Lenin notes: “it is logical to assume that all matter has a property essentially related to sensation, the property of reflection.” At the same time, Lenin refers to the judgments of a number of contemporary natural scientists, as well as to Diderot’s opinion that the ability to sense is a universal property of matter or a product of its organization.
So, it is assumed that all material formations have the property of reflection, understood as the ability to imprint in changes in their states the signs and characteristics of the objects that caused these changes. Reflection, therefore, has an attributive character, and it is closely related to other universal properties of material phenomena, primarily with movement and interaction. The universality of relationships and interactions is associated with the obligatory appearance of certain traces, or “imprints” of the influence of one body on another. Such traces are somewhat similar to the causes that gave rise to them.
The specific nature of the material interaction also determines the originality of the reflection it produces, the completeness and accuracy of the reproduction of the properties and characteristics of the original in the reflecting material system. In living nature, reflection acquires signs of selectivity and activity. The properties of external objects reflected by living organisms have different meanings for the latter. The reflection of these properties correlates with the internal program of the body’s vital activity; the information obtained is used to develop an appropriate behavioral response to external stimuli.
With the emergence of the nervous system in animals, it is here that reflection processes are concentrated. Neurophysiological reflection ensures the implementation of a more or less complex sequence of actions directed by vital goals and real conditions for their achievement. The transition from unconditioned reflexes and their complex combinations, instincts to conditioned reflexes, from automatic patterns of response to stimuli to active search and orientation in a dynamically changing external environment is accompanied by the formation and complication of a mental reflection of reality. An image of the external world is formed in the animal’s brain, reproducing the surrounding objects, some of their connections and changes.
Human consciousness is understood in Marxist philosophy as the highest form of reflection. It has as its prerequisite the psyche of animals, but it developed on the basis of a qualitatively new, specifically human way of being - the practical-transformative development of the world. Engels's article, which is usually cited when discussing this issue, is called "The Role of Labor in the Process of Transformation of Ape into Man." It emphasizes that the transition of our distant animal ancestors to upright walking freed up the hand to perform increasingly complex operations, and the improvement of labor skills and the dominance over nature that was established along with this expanded man’s horizons, stimulated his cognitive activity and mental activity. Living together in a primitive community, people felt the need for verbal communication, which, through exercise, created their own organ, as well as a system of dismembered sound signals that make up language as a means of communication.
So, “first work, and then with it articulate speech, were the two most important stimuli, under the influence of which the monkey’s brain gradually turned into the human brain... The development of the brain and the feelings subordinate to it, an increasingly clear consciousness, the ability to abstract and inference had the opposite effect on work and on language, giving both more and more new impetuses to development.” This development took place within the framework of an emerging new, social form of organization of life, also based on labor and becoming more complex as new natural conditions of existence were mastered and human needs became more and more diverse. Hunting, cattle breeding, agriculture, crafts, shipping, trade arose, and with them art and science arose, as well as religion, understood in Marxism as a fantastic reflection of existence in the heads of people.
Before these formations, which appear primarily as products of the human head, according to Engels, the more modest products of the working hand recede into the background, especially since the head planning this work had the opportunity to attract other people’s hands to carry out its plans. People are accustomed to explaining their actions based on their thinking, instead of explaining them based on their needs, which, of course, are reflected in the head and are realized.
Thus, thanks to work, linguistic communication and the social organization of life, a person stands out from nature and rises above it, while maintaining the closest connections with it, determined by the real process of life. A person is a subject of labor activity and the social, political and spiritual processes that arise on its basis. He is a creature that characterizes a new level of complexity of the existence of material reality, embodying the social form of the movement of matter. Marx emphasized that the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in the individual. In its reality it is the totality of all social relations.”
Human existence is initially actively active. This activity is versatile and tends to be universal and comprehensive. Thanks to human activity, nature, conquered by people, turns into the sphere of their collective self-affirmation and self-realization. In the process of practical activity of people, a new, artificial habitat is created, social reality, the world of human culture is formed. This world, transformed and partly even created by humanity, is reflected in the forms of human consciousness.
The difference between human consciousness and the psyche of animals is seen here in the fact that the basis of consciousness is thinking, which operates with concepts that reflect the general and essential characteristics of objects. One of the objects that a person thinks about is himself. This capacity for self-awareness is not, however, the product of purely personal, individual effort. Each individual person enters life with only the biological prerequisites needed to become a mature person. The realization of this possibility is achieved in the process of introducing the developing personality to culture - mastering the rules and norms of behavior, accumulated knowledge about the properties of things and the connections between them.
The problem of the ideal
Among Marxist philosophers, a discussion arose about whether the concepts of consciousness and the ideal are identical. One of the positions in this debate is represented by the opinion that the ideal is a mental phenomenon, and it can only exist in the conscious states of an individual as information updated by the brain of this individual. No existence of the ideal outside of individual consciousness is allowed. Another, opposite point of view is that the quality of the ideal is attributed not to individual thoughts or other images of consciousness of individuals, but to those specific realities of culture that historically arose on the basis of the transformative and practical activity of people, are inspired by it and therefore must be understood by everyone a separate individual not only from the side of their material, sensually tangible existence, but above all in their socio-cultural meaning.
According to the conviction of the Soviet philosopher Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov (1924-1979), who defended the second position, such a “collectively created world of spiritual culture by people, an internally organized and dissected world of historically developing and socially fixed (“legalized”) universal ideas of people about the “real” world , - and confronts the individual psyche as some very special and unique world - as an “ideal world in general”, as an “idealized” world.” Here the ideal is not reduced to the fleeting states of the psyche of an individual, but, on the contrary, has the dignity of durability and universal significance. Developing this point of view, Ilyenkov turns, on the one hand, to the texts of Marx, and on the other hand, to a powerful and deep historical and philosophical tradition dating back to Plato and consolidated by Hegel. When Marx emphasizes that the form of value is ideal, he means the fact that any object transformed by human labor and capable, therefore, of satisfying human needs takes on such a form.
At the same time, the value of a product exists in reality, outside a person’s head and regardless of his thinking. Value is a property that labor imparted to things, although it itself is immaterial, because it has a socio-economic character. The social organism is not a simple repetition or summation of individual human organisms; it represents a historically established and developing system of social relations, “objective ideas”, forms and patterns of the “collective mind” of humanity, covering moral and legal norms, methods of organizing state-political life and even, as Ilyenkov notes, grammatical and syntactic structures of speech and language, logical rules of reasoning.
The psyche and consciousness of an individual person, in accordance with this point of view, are dependent on this special socio-cultural reality, which has objectified, materialized forms in which ideal values are recorded. Historically established ways of social life confront the individual with his consciousness and will, representing a supernatural objective reality, which simply imposes on an individual person the ways of his worldview, worldview and attitude to everything that surrounds him, and to himself.
Ilyenkov, of course, feels the dangerous closeness of the philosophical position he defends to the Hegelian concept of a self-developing spirit and calls for a clear distinction between the world of culture in its objectified forms, as well as the world of human ideas about culture, on the one hand, and the real material world that exists independently of these socially legitimized forms of experience and objectification of the spirit - on the other.
“Sharpening” his initial premises, Ilyenkov insists that the ideal, in the form of an internal scheme of the activity of consciousness, has only a ghostly, imaginary existence; it acquires reality only in the course of objectification and deobjectification. Consciousness, he emphasizes, arises only where the individual is forced to look at himself as if from the outside, through the eyes of other people. In general, Ilyenkov concludes, the ideal exists only in man, but not in a single individual, but in a real totality of people carrying out specifically human life activities, participating in the joint social production of their lives 1 .
Doctrine of Personality
From the foregoing follows the sociocentric concept of human personality developed by Ilyenkov. It fully recognizes that a person is always unique, unrepeatable, indivisible, just as any individual is indivisible and irreproducible. The universal in personality is here understood not as the same for many individuals; it represents a law that governs a mass of individuals and is realized in the actions of each of them.
The essence of man is the totality of social relations. It is the social system of relationships between individuals that makes each of them what he is. “From beginning to end, personality is a phenomenon of social nature, of social origin.” The “body” of a person as an individual is his organic body together with those artificial organs that he creates from the substance of external nature, strengthening his natural organs and, at the same time, enriching and complicating his connections with other individuals, his essence. Personality is both born and exists as a “knot” in a network of human relationships in the process of collective labor activity.
The dualism of body and soul, according to Ilyenkov, simply does not exist, for this, as he asserts in full agreement with Spinoza, is one and the same thing, only in different projections. At the same time, the human personality acts in relation to the individual’s body as an “external” necessity that forcibly changes it. The child is taught to walk, although this is alien to the needs of his body. He is taught various ways to use the capabilities of the hand, learns to speak, etc. As the organs of the individual’s body are transformed into organs of human vital activity, the personality itself emerges as an individual set of human functional organs. This is not the socialization of the individual, but rather its formation.
The child learns all human ways of activity from the outside, because not one of them is programmed in the genes. Personality arises when an individual independently engages in cultural activity in accordance with the rules and standards of the latter. Conditions of external activity, externally specified functions form corresponding connections in the brain. By merging with his role, which an individual is forced to play within a known system of connections between people, he trains exactly those of his organs that are needed to fulfill this role. “A personality is more significant the more fully and broadly” its collective-universal, and not at all individual, uniqueness is represented in it - in its deeds, in its words, in its actions. The uniqueness of a true personality lies precisely in the fact that it - opens something new for everyone, better than others and more fully than others, expressing the “essence” of all other people with his actions, pushing the boundaries of existing possibilities, revealing to everyone what they do not yet know, do not know how to, do not understand.” for what reasons can a person, formed “like everyone else,” or as a personified social role, strive and be able to achieve something radically new?
In Marxist-Leninist philosophy there are other, somewhat different, views on personality. Ilyenkov’s point of view attracts attention with its consistency, consistency with the general “spirit” of the socio-philosophical 1 concept of mature Marxism, but at the same time it amazes with its overt sociologism. Strictly speaking, the human problem, with this approach, does not exist at all. It is only necessary to streamline the totality of social relations, and the conveyor belt of social life will begin to produce the required number of exemplary individuals. But then what about questions about personal responsibility, freedom to choose a life position, and the meaning of life? Are these all imaginary, far-fetched questions?
The point is not that Ilyenkov, as well as Marx and Hegel, were completely wrong in their reasoning about human nature. Another thing is important: they thought about a person, looking at him as if from the outside, from the outside, and this point of view, external to human subjectivity, was implicitly recognized by them as the only one that had philosophical significance and justification.
Freudianism and neo-Freudianism
Austrian psychiatrist and psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) created the concept of psychoanalysis, which has both specific scientific and certain philosophical content associated with a radical change in ideas about a person and his consciousness. Freud argued that the beginning and basis of human mental life is not consciousness at all, but a complex complex of instincts, drives, desires inherent in people from birth. Of particular importance, he believed, are two universal instincts - Eros (sexual instinct, instinct of life, self-preservation) and Thanatos (instinct of aggression, destruction, death). Studying human neuroses, he found that the cause of many of them is the conflict between sexual drives and moral-volitional prohibitions, restrictions leading to the suppression of these drives. Freud suggested that many mental disorders that affect the human personality are associated with erotic experiences coming from childhood or even inherited from ancestors. Sexual instinct, according to Freud, is associated with universal psychic energy that has a sexual connotation (libido). This energy can be sublimated (transformed) and transferred to a wide variety of objects, being realized in the corresponding types of human activity, including creative ones.
Freud also argued that human mental life is governed by two disparate principles - the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The first of them is the dominant one, but it is, as it were, blind, because it is concentrated only on experiences and sensations, while very different processes take place in life, and it is not obvious which of them will lead to suffering and which, on the contrary, will give us pleasure. Bringing internal impulses, guided by the principle of pleasure, into accordance with actually existing conditions of life (following the principle of reality) is associated with the development of the human personality, with the implementation of cognition and with the assimilation of social norms and rules of behavior established in society. As a result of the multidirectional nature of these principles, all human feelings are irreducibly contradictory.
The structure of personality, according to Freud, is the unity of three interconnected areas: “It” (the seat of instincts, the sphere of the unconscious, where the principle of pleasure predominates); “I” (the area of activity of reason and reason, guided by the principle of reality and expressing the ordering principle of the individual’s life); “Super-I” (a product of the cultural development of society, including moral and other regulation of human behavior on the basis of generally accepted rules, patterns and higher feelings). The role of the “I” in the structure of personality resembles the role of a rider who saddles a horse and seeks to control its movements, but at the same time takes into account its aspirations, because otherwise the horse can throw off the rider. The task of the “I” is to present its decisions as if they were the own motives of the “It”. The complex, often very contradictory nature of the interrelations of these three areas of the personality requires the use of historically developed defense mechanisms designed to somehow harmonize and bring into mutual correspondence heterogeneous impulses and aspirations, to ensure acceptable integrity and stability of the personality. These are, for example, the mechanisms of sublimation, repression, regression, projection, and rationalization.
Clarifying the role of the unconscious in human life and in the structure of the personality is the indisputable merit of Freud. On this basis, many rationalistic illusions drawn from the ideas of the Enlightenment or even high antiquity were revised. True, it should be recognized as groundless the intention to present Freudianism as a universal philosophical and worldview concept that allows, based on a single position, to cover and successfully develop the entire field of problems of the formation and development of man, society, and culture.
Some directions of social and philosophical thought soon sprang from Freud's teachings, united by the general name of neo-Freudianism and overcoming, as a rule, the absolutization of the sexual origins of human behavior characteristic of Freud.
An interesting attempt to compare apparently very diverse approaches to solving the human problem was made by the German-American psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980), a prominent representative of neo-Freudianism. In one of his later works, he states that he found answers to the questions that tormented him about the phenomena of individual and social life in the teachings of Freud and Marx. His attention was drawn to the contrast of these systems; some of their provisions raised doubts in him; there was a desire to combine my understanding of the ideas of these thinkers and a critical attitude towards them 1 . At the same time, Fromm notes that he considers Marx to be a thinker of much greater depth and scope than Freud.
Fromm sees the similarity of the worldviews of Marx and Freud in the fact that both of these researchers were filled with confidence in the orderliness of the real world, considered in its foundations, and in the accessibility of the structures of being to scientific study. Further, they were characterized by a critical mindset. Marx was skeptical of all ideologies and ideals, finding that they concealed economic and social interests, and therefore avoided the wasted use of such lofty words as freedom, truth and justice.
Freud, studying hypnotic states, when a person accepts as reality something that is not, ultimately came to the conclusion that a significant part of the thoughts of a waking person does not correspond to reality and a significant part of actual events is not realized by him. Marx sought to liberate man from alienation and economic enslavement, placing
iCM.: Fromm, E. The human soul / 3. Fromm. M„ 1992. P.300.
great hopes for the “weapon of truth.” Freud also believed that although illusions help a person endure the squalor of real life, in order to change reality a person must turn the unconscious into the conscious. Fromm considers humanism to be a distinctive feature of these two teachings.
True, Freud's views were narrowed by “his mechanistic materialism, which explained the needs of human nature by his sexuality” 1 . Marx's broader view of society stemmed from the understanding that class society deforms man. Freud was a liberal reformer, Marx a radical revolutionary. But they were united by a passionate desire to free man and confidence in the achievability of this goal through knowledge of the truth and active action.
In Freud's concept, Fromm attaches the greatest importance to the doctrine of the unconscious, defining psychoanalysis as a system based on the recognition that people usually avoid awareness of some experiences that are important to them. Since the conflict between the unconscious reality in us and the inadequate reflection of this reality in our consciousness often leads to neuroses, neurotic symptoms can be relieved and character traits corrected by bringing the unconscious to correct awareness. Marx captures a similar conclusion, noting that it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness. Each form of organization of social life makes it difficult to understand certain facts and, at the same time, encourages the affirmation of certain illusions. Consequently, the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious depends on the structure of society and on the patterns of thoughts and feelings accepted in it.
In its content, the unconscious, as Fromm argues, covers the entire diversity of human aspirations, directing both towards light and darkness. “In any culture, a person contains all the possibilities: he is an archaic person, a beast of prey, a cannibal, an idolater, but he is also a being capable of reason, love, and justice. This means that the content of the unconscious is neither good nor evil, neither rational nor irrational, it is both, all human. The unconscious is the whole person minus that part of him that corresponds to the characteristics of his society,” and therefore this part is fearlessly translated by him into the plane of thought.
With the help of rationalization, a person tries to present his actions as determined by reasonable and socially acceptable motives, hiding their true reasons, including from his own awareness. The inability of the overwhelming majority of people to understand the causes of phenomena, unless they are striking, and in particular the inability to understand human relations and social problems, the replacement of understanding by the repetition of stereotypical phrases is, according to Fromm, the result of social depression and internal deadness. He believes that only independent people who are in love with life can overcome widespread thoughtlessness.
Formulating his “credo,” Fromm first of all notes the conviction that the essence of man is accessible to rational knowledge, and it is not an unchanging, ahistorical substance. This essence is contradictory, because man belongs to nature and at the same time is separated from it. He is endowed with instincts, but cannot rely in his life only on them; he can either find himself or lose himself. The only force capable of saving people from self-destruction is the mind, which can recognize the true essence of things hidden under layers of lies and ideological fabrications. But reason must be based on hope and faith; Comprehension of truth, according to Fromm, is primarily a matter of character, and not just the mind.
Philosophical anthropology
The problem of man is central to modern philosophical anthropology - one of the influential trends in Western philosophy of the last century. The task of philosophical anthropology is seen by its representatives to be to carry out philosophical knowledge of man in all the diversity of his existence, covering the origin and essence of man, the connection of his physical, mental and spiritual principles, the driving forces and directions of his development, as well as those forces that he himself it sets in motion. One of the founders of modern philosophical anthropology, the German thinker Max Scheler (1874-1928), noted that for an educated European the word “man” evokes three incompatible circles of ideas: a) Judeo-Christian ideas about the creation of the world and man, about paradise and the fall; b) the Greek-ancient view of man as a rational being, which is associated with the doctrine of the rational foundations of the universe and the involvement of man in this universal mind; c) natural scientific ideas about man as a product of natural development, differing from animals in the special complexity of structure and functions. So, natural science, philosophical and theological anthropology are strikingly different and have no points of contact, but we do not have a single idea of man.
According to Scheler, there are four essential stages of existence. The first of them is represented by inorganic being, which is devoid of internal aspects, independence, and its own existential center. Plants belonging to the second stage already have such a center, because they unconsciously have a “vital impulse” for growth and reproduction and the specific purposefulness associated with this. True, this impulse is directed exclusively outward; Even the most primitive reflection is absent; there is no body responsible for connecting all processes. A higher form of the soul, superior to the vital impulse of plants, is represented by animal instincts, thanks to which animals, which make up the third stage, have sensations and consciousness, and with them a more developed life center than plants, forming its own spatio-temporal unity and your individuality. A person representing the fourth stage is characterized by intelligence, but, according to Scheler, it is not this that characterizes the main thing in a person.
The new principle of human existence, as this author claims, lies outside everything that in the broadest sense is called life. Moreover, this principle is opposite to life in general and can be called spirit. The spirit combines thinking in the form of ideas, a certain kind of contemplation, and some emotional-volitional acts. The active center of the appearing spirit is the personality. The peculiarity of a spiritual being, its main definition, is existential independence from physical and organic being, freedom, opposing any pressure and coercion.
The connection of an animal with the outside world is determined by the structure of its body, which directs its feelings and drives. For an animal, objects do not exist in themselves, in their objective existence; it is not in control of itself and is not aware of itself. A person is able to dominate himself, his desires; he can regard himself as a special thing, objectively related to other things. “Only a person - since he is a person - can rise above himself as a living being and, starting from one center, as if on the other side of the space-time world, make everything, including himself, the subject of his knowledge” 1. But this center of human acts of objectifying the world cannot belong to this world itself. According to Scheler, this center can only be located in the highest ground of being. Man is a being that transcends himself and the world; he is involved in the Divinity, which comprehends and realizes itself in man.
The human spirit is characterized by openness to the world. At the same time, human nature is irreducibly dual. Man is a partial center of the spirit, but spiritual acts always have physical and psychological accompaniment, for they draw their energy from the sphere of life’s drives. The spirit permeates life with an idea, but life is capable of bringing into action and realizing the spirit.
Of undoubted interest is the review and analytical work of the Jewish religious philosopher and writer Martin Buber (1878-1965), “The Problem of Man,” written in the 40s of the last century, which sets out his understanding of the task of philosophical anthropology. This task is seen by Buber to be, without replacing the essence of the matter with details, distinctions and comparisons, to realize human knowledge as self-knowledge, and for this the philosopher himself must realize and express himself as a person. He will be able to recognize a complete personality only if he does not lose sight of his subjectivity and does not turn into a dispassionate observer, i.e. if he fully includes himself in this process of self-knowledge, he will make it his life’s work. As long as we consider ourselves as an object, we recognize a person only as a thing among things, without achieving his desired integrity.
The person most inclined and prepared for such self-knowledge is the one who feels lonely and in this loneliness has met himself, and in his “I” has seen a person in general. “In the icy atmosphere of loneliness, a person inevitably turns into a question for himself, and since this question mercilessly exposes and brings into play his innermost being, the person also gains the experience of self-knowledge” 1.
In the history of the human spirit, Buber distinguishes between eras of settlement and homelessness. In the first case, anthropological thought becomes simply a part of cosmology, in the second it acquires independence and depth. Thus, for Aristotle, man was not a problem, because he was securely located in a closed and completely habitable Cosmos. But Augustine carried within himself a feeling of the split of the world into the opposing forces of Light and Darkness, he saw a person made up of soul and body and belonging to both of these kingdoms. Augustine turns to God with a direct question about the essence of man, finding the nature of man a great mystery. But already in the Middle Ages, a person finds a new home - an equipped and understandable Christian Cosmos, described in detail in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The philosophical understanding of this house was carried out by Thomas Aquinas.
The Renaissance man also feels confident in the world. However, after the publication of Copernicus’s work comes the awareness of the infinity of the universe, and with it the horror expressed by Pascal, caused by the eternal silence of these vast spaces, the feeling of human limitations and dependence, the fragility of his existence (“thinking reed”) and, at the same time, the sublimity of man as conscious being. The harmonious medieval picture of the world turned out to be destroyed, the idea of the infinity of the Universe excluded the interpretation of the Universe as a world home and its calm habitation. The New Cosmos could be thought of, but it was impossible to imagine. Nevertheless, Spinoza tried to eliminate the ominous appearance of astronomical infinity, believing that extension is only one of the attributes of infinite substance, of which, like God, each of the people is a part, and God loves himself and these parts of himself. Kant improved this solution to the problem of man, establishing that space and time are just forms of human comprehension of the world. Hegel completely deposed a specific personality in the interests of the world mind and its self-creation. Man for Hegel is only a way for the world mind to achieve its self-awareness, and all the problems of human and historical existence are explained as “cunning” necessary for the absolute idea to achieve its completeness. Hegelian philosophy is a new attempt by man to gain confidence and build a “world house.” True, it turned out to be unsuitable for living, because there was no spatial certainty in it, but only the order of historical time. Hegel's system provided material for thought, but was not suitable as an object of faith, which is so necessary in everyday life. Marx then offered the proletariat, although not a new model of the world, but at least a new model of society, or, more precisely, an explanation of the path along which human society will achieve perfection. The human world was presented as a society that contains forces capable of renewing it. Moreover, since Marx recognized the natural-historical pattern of social development, “the problem of human choice as the cause of an event, including a social event and the fate of society, does not arise here at all” 1 .
However, the chaos of historical cataclysms established itself in the world of social phenomena, and confidence in the future was lost. A new anthropological fear was born. The anthropological reduction of universal existence to human existence proposed by Feuerbach did not eliminate the philosophical illusion of the problemlessness of this latter, and in this regard, Feuerbach’s criticism of the Hegelian system turned out to be insufficient, and his posing the question of man returned anthropology, as Buber notes, to the pre-Kantian level.
Nietzsche, however, recognized man as a problematic being, viewed him as a not fully formed biological species, as a kind of error of nature and a contradiction to himself. According to Nietzsche, man is an animal that has left the animal world, but has not yet fully understood its purpose.
He must borrow the meaning of his existence from life, understood as the “will to power.” Buber finds this answer to the question about the essence of man completely wrong - if only because true greatness, presupposing a certain power, internal power, influence on people, in no way comes down to a manic desire to increase power.