Spirit in German classical philosophy. Classical German philosophy: briefly about the most important
1. German philosophy of the 19th century. - unique phenomenon of world philosophy.
The uniqueness of German philosophy in the fact that in just over 100 years she has succeeded in:
Deeply investigate the problems that have tormented humanity for centuries, and come to conclusions that determined the entire future development of philosophy;
To combine in itself almost all the philosophical trends known at that time - from subjective idealism to vulgar materialism and irrationalism;
Discover dozens of names of prominent philosophers who entered the "golden fund" of world philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc.).
2. In general, in the German philosophy of the XIX century. the following can be distinguished main directions:
German classical philosophy (first half of the 19th century);
Materialism (middle and second half of the 19th century);
Irrationalism (second half and end of the 19th century), "philosophy of life".
3. German classical philosophy became especially widespread at the end of the 18th - the first half of the 19th centuries. Its basis was the work of the five most prominent German philosophers that time:
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804);
Johann Fichte (1762 - 1814);
Friedrich Schelling (1775 - 1854);
Georg Hegel (1770 - 1831);
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 - 1872).
In German classical philosophy, three leading philosophical directions:
Objective idealism (Kant, Schelling, Hegel);
Subjective idealism (Fichte);
Materialism (Feuerbach).
German classical philosophy developed several common problems, which allows us to speak of it as a holistic phenomenon. She:
She turned the attention of philosophy from traditional problems (being, thinking, knowledge, etc.) to the study of human essence;
She paid special attention to the problem of development;
Significantly enriched the logical and theoretical apparatus of philosophy;
Looked at history as a holistic process.
4. The founder of German classical philosophy is considered Immanuel Kant(1724 - 1804).
Immanuel Kant:
He gave an explanation for the emergence of the solar system due to natural causes on the basis of Newton's laws - from a rotating nebula of particles of matter discharged in space;
He put forward a theory about the existence of limits to the cognitive ability of a person and the impossibility of knowing the inner essence of things and phenomena of the environment ("things in themselves");
Formulated a moral law ("categorical imperative");
He put forward the idea of "eternal peace" in the future, based on the economic inefficiency of war and its legal prohibition. Georg Hegel(1770 - 1831) identified being and thinking, put forward the doctrine of the absolute idea, independent of consciousness and being the root cause of everything that exists, the material world, and thereby deeply substantiated concept of objective idealism, widespread in several Western countries.
Hegel's exceptional service to philosophy - development of dialectics- the doctrine of universal development, its basic laws and principles.
Johann Fichte(1762 -.1814), on the contrary, made a great contribution to the development concepts of subjective idealism, according to which the only and main reality for a person is himself, his consciousness (the so-called "I-concept").
Friedrich Schelling(1775 - 1854) deeply substantiated the understanding of nature from the standpoint of objective idealism, put forward the idea that freedom and the legal order are inherent in nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach(1804 - 1872) was a representative of the materialistic trend in German classical philosophy. Feuerbach criticized idealism and put forward a holistic and consistent materialistic picture of the world. In his philosophy, Feuerbach acted as complete atheist, He proved the absence of God, his artificiality, invention by people, transferring unrealized human ideals to the personality of God. 5. Another direction of German philosophy of the XIX century. along with German classical philosophy was materialism, became widespread in the second half of the 19th century.
German materialism of the 19th century. presented mainly:
Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach;
Marxist philosophy;
Creativity of vulgar materialists.
The atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach is reckoned both with German classical philosophy and with materialism. This is true, since Feuerbach's philosophy completed the German classical philosophy and laid the foundations of the German materialism of the 19th century, was the watershed between them.
6. Classical materialism of the 19th century. presented Marxism comprehensive teaching, which included:
Marxist philosophy;
Political economy (economic doctrine);
Scientific communism (socio-political theory). The founders of Marxism were German scientists and philosophers Karl Marx(1818 - 1883) and Friedrich Engels(1820 - 1895).
Marxist Philosophy:
She put forward a consistently materialistic picture of the world;
She showed the role of the economy, production for material and social existence;
Comprehended philosophical problems from the standpoint of dialectics (dialectical materialism);
Considered history as a purposeful and regular process (historical materialism);
She gave a detailed picture of the emergence of a person, society, state;
She spoke from an atheistic standpoint.
7. A variety of German materialism of the 19th century. was vulgar materialism. Vulgar materialists - Focht, Buechner, Moleschott- looked at the problems of man, the surrounding world, knowledge exclusively from the standpoint of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology). In particular, they:
They mechanically transferred the laws of nature (behavior, organization of animal life, natural selection, struggle for existence) to human society (social Darwinism); they denied the ideal, the ideality of consciousness;
They considered the activity of consciousness as a physiological process ("the brain secretes a thought, like the liver - bile").
8. In the second half of the XIX century. ideas of irrationalism were especially widespread in Germany.
Irrationalism- a direction in philosophy that denied the objective laws of being and history, dialectics, perceiving the surrounding world and history as chaos, a chain of accidents.
The founder of irrationalism is considered Arthur Schopenhauer(1788 - 1860).
In general, Schopenhauer's philosophy is filled with a pessimistic spirit, disbelief in a person's ability to influence the world around him and his own life.
Close to irrationalism is "philosophy of life", which puts the focus not on abstract concepts - being, idea, matter, etc., but on the being of a person in the world - that is, life, the only reality for a person.
One of the founders of the "philosophy of life" was Friedrich Nietzsche(1844 - 1900). In particular, he put forward ideas about the ability of a person to completely influence his destiny, the driving forces of human behavior ("the will to live", "the will to power" - the expansion of one's "I"), the illusory nature of God ("God is dead") .
In the future, the "philosophy of life" formed the basis of popular modern philosophical trends - pragmatism And existentialism.
12) GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
German classical philosophy represents a significant stage in the development of philosophical thought and culture of mankind.
It is represented by philosophical creativity:
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804);
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814);
- Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854);
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831);
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872). Each of these philosophers created his own philosophical system, filled with a wealth of ideas and concepts.
1. The role of philosophy in the history of mankind and the development of world culture is that it is called upon to be the critical conscience of culture, the consciousness arguing with reality, the soul of culture.
2. Human nature was explored, not just human history:
– for Kant, man is a moral being;
- Fichte emphasizes the effectiveness, activity of human consciousness and self-consciousness, considers the structure of human life according to the requirements of the mind;
– Schelling shows the relationship between the objective and the subjective;
– Hegel more broadly considers the boundaries of the activity of self-consciousness and individual consciousness: the self-consciousness of the individual in him correlates not only with external objects, but also with other self-consciousness, from which various social forms arise;
- Feuerbach defines a new form of materialism - anthropological materialism, at the center of which is a real person who is a subject for himself and an object for another person.
3. All representatives of classical German philosophy defined it as a special system of philosophical disciplines, categories, ideas:
– Kant singles out epistemology and ethics as the main philosophical disciplines;
– Schelling – natural philosophy, ontology;
– Fichte saw in philosophy such sections as ontological, epistemological, socio-political;
– Hegel defined a broad system of philosophical knowledge, which included the philosophy of nature, logic, philosophy of history, history of philosophy, philosophy of law, philosophy of state, philosophy of morality, philosophy of religion, philosophy of development of individual consciousness, etc.;
– Feuerbach considered the philosophical problems of history, religion, ontology, epistemology and ethics.
4. Classical German philosophy defines a holistic concept of dialectics:
- Kant's dialectic is the dialectic of the boundaries and possibilities of human cognition: feelings, reason and human reason;
- Fichte's dialectics is reduced to the development of the creative activity of the Self, to the interaction of the Self and the non-Self as opposites, on the basis of the struggle of which the development of human self-consciousness takes place;
- Schelling transfers to nature the principles of dialectical development proposed by Fichte, nature for him is a developing spirit;
- Hegel presented a detailed, comprehensive theory of idealistic dialectics. He studied the entire natural, historical and spiritual world as a process, that is, in its continuous movement, change, transformation and development, contradictions, breaks in gradualness, the struggle of the new with the old, directed movement;
– Feuerbach in his dialectics considers the connections of phenomena, their interactions and changes, the unity of opposites in the development of phenomena (spirit and body, human consciousness and material nature).
13) Positivism in philosophy
Positivism (lat. positivus - positive) considers the question of the relationship between philosophy and science as the main problem. The main thesis of positivism is that true (positive) knowledge about reality can only be obtained by specific, special sciences.
The first historical form of positivism arose in the 30-40s of the 19th century as an antithesis to traditional metaphysics in the sense of the philosophical doctrine of the principles of everything that exists, of the universal principles of being, knowledge of which cannot be given in direct sensory experience. The founder of positivist philosophy is Auguste Comte (1798-1857), a French philosopher and sociologist who continued some of the traditions of the Enlightenment, expressed his conviction that science was capable of infinite development, and adhered to the classification of sciences developed by the encyclopedists.
Kant argued that all attempts to adapt "metaphysical" problems to science are doomed to failure, because science does not need any philosophy, but must rely on itself. The "new philosophy", which must decisively break with the old, metaphysical ("revolution in philosophy"), should regard as its main task the generalization of scientific data obtained in particular, special sciences.
The second historical form of positivism (the turn of the 19th-20th centuries) is associated with the names of the German philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) and the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916). The main currents are Machism and empirio-criticism. The Machists refused to study an external source of knowledge as opposed to the Kantian idea of the “thing in itself” and thereby revived the traditions of Berkeley and Hume. The main task of philosophy was seen not in the generalization of the data of particular sciences (Comte), but in the creation of a theory of scientific knowledge. We considered scientific concepts as a sign (the theory of hieroglyphs) for an economical description of the elements of experience - sensations.
In 10-20 years. In the 20th century, a third form of positivism appears - neo-positivism or analytical philosophy, which has several directions.
Logical positivism or logical empiricism is represented by the names of Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and others. The focus is on the problem of empirical meaningfulness of scientific statements. Philosophy, the logical positivists argue, is neither a theory of knowledge nor a meaningful science of any reality. Philosophy is a kind of activity in the analysis of natural and artificial languages. Logical positivism is based on the principle of verification (lat. verus - true; facere - to do), which means empirical confirmation of the theoretical positions of science by comparing them with observable objects, sensory data, experiment. Scientific statements that are not confirmed by experience have no cognitive value and are incorrect. A statement of fact is called a protocol or a protocol sentence. The limitation of verification was subsequently revealed in the fact that the universal laws of science are not reducible to a set of protocol sentences. The very principle of verifiability also could not be exhausted by the simple sum of any experience. Therefore, supporters of linguistic analysis, another influential direction of neopositivism, George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), fundamentally abandoned the verification theory of meaning and some other theses.
The fourth form of positivism - postpositivism is characterized by a departure from many of the fundamental provisions of positivism. Such an evolution is characteristic of the work of Karl Popper (1902-1988), who came to the conclusion that philosophical problems cannot be reduced to the analysis of language. He saw the main task of philosophy in the problem of demarcation, the distinction between scientific knowledge and non-scientific knowledge. The demarcation method is based on the principle of falsification, i.e. fundamental refutation of any statement related to science. If a statement, concept, or theory cannot be refuted, then it is not science, but religion. The growth of scientific knowledge consists in putting forward bold hypotheses and refuting them.
14) Philosophy of Karl Marx
1. Marxist philosophy was created jointly by two German scientists Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895) in the second half of the 19th century. and is an integral part of a broader doctrine - Marxism, which, along with philosophy, includes economics (political economy) and socio-political issues (scientific communism).
The philosophy of Marxism provided answers to many burning questions of its time. It became widespread (left Germany, became international) in the world and gained great popularity in the late 19th - first half of the 20th centuries.
In a number of countries (the USSR, the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa), Marxist philosophy was elevated to the rank of official state ideology and was turned into a dogma.
An urgent task for today's Marxism is the liberation from dogmas and adaptation to the modern era, taking into account the results of the scientific and technological revolution and the reality of post-industrial society.
2. The emergence of Marxism and Marxist philosophy was facilitated by:
Previous materialist philosophy (Democritus, Epicurus, English materialists of the 17th century - Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, French enlighteners of the 18th century, and especially the atheistic-materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach of the middle of the 19th century);
The rapid growth of discoveries in science and technology (the discovery of the laws of conservation of matter and energy, the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, the discovery of the cellular structure of living organisms, the invention of the wire telegraph, the steam locomotive, the steamboat, the automobile, photography, numerous discoveries in the field of production, the mechanization of labor);
The collapse of the ideals of the Great French Revolution (freedom, equality, fraternity, the ideas of the French Enlightenment), their impossibility of implementation in real life;
The growth of social class contradictions and conflicts (revolution of 1848-1849, reaction, wars, the Paris Commune of 1871);
The crisis of traditional bourgeois values (the transformation of the bourgeoisie from a revolutionary into a conservative force, the crisis of bourgeois marriage and morality).
3. Marxist philosophy is materialistic in nature and consists of two large sections - dialectical materialism and historical materialism (often historical materialism is considered as part of dialectical).
4. The philosophical innovation of K. Marx and F. Engels was the materialistic understanding of history (historical materialism). The essence of historical materialism is as follows:
At each stage of social development, in order to ensure their livelihoods, people enter into special, objective production relations that do not depend on their will (the sale of their own labor, material production, distribution);
Production relations, the level of productive forces form the economic system, which is the basis for the institutions of the state and society, social relations;
These state and public institutions, social relations act as a superstructure in relation to the economic basis;
Base and superstructure mutually influence each other;
Depending on the level of development of the productive forces and production relations, a certain type of base and superstructure, socio-economic formations are distinguished - the primitive communal system (low level of production forces and production relations, the beginnings of society); slave-owning society (the economy is based on slavery); Asiatic
The mode of production is a special socio-economic formation, the economy of which is based on the mass, collective, tightly controlled by the state labor of free people - farmers in the valleys of large rivers (Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China); feudalism (the economy is based on large land ownership and the labor of dependent peasants); capitalism (industrial production based on the labor of free, but not the owners of the means of production, hired workers); socialist (communist) society - a society of the future, based on the free labor of equal people with state (public) ownership of the means of production;
The growth in the level of productive forces leads to a change in production relations and a change in socio-economic formations and the socio-political system;
The level of the economy, material production, production relations determine the fate of the state and society, the course of history.
5. Also, Marx and Engels singled out and developed
the following concepts:
Means of production;
Alienation;
Surplus value;
Exploitation of man by man.
Means of production - a unique product, a function of labor of the highest level, allowing the production of a new product. For the production of a new product, in addition to the means of production, a force is needed to serve them - the so-called "labor force".
In the course of the evolution of capitalism, there is a process of alienation of the main working mass from the means of production and, consequently, from the results of labor. The main commodity - the means of production - is concentrated in the hands of a few owners, and the bulk of the working people, who do not have the means of production and independent sources of income, are forced to turn to the owners of the means of production as hired labor for wages in order to meet their vital needs.
The value of the product produced by the hired labor force is higher than the value of their labor (in the form of wages), the difference between them, according to Marx, is surplus value, part of which goes into the pocket of the capitalist, and part is invested in new means of production to obtain even greater surplus value in the future.
The founders of Marxist philosophy saw a way out of this situation in the establishment of new, socialist (communist) socio-economic relations, in which:
Private ownership of the means of production will be abolished;
The exploitation of man by man and the appropriation of the results of someone else's labor (surplus product) by a narrow group of people will be eliminated;
Private ownership of the means of production will be replaced by public (state);
The product produced, the results of labor will be shared among all members of society through fair distribution.
6. The basis of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels was the dialectic of Hegel, but on completely different, materialistic (rather than idealistic) principles. In the words of Engels, Hegel's dialectic was put "upside down" by the Marxists. The following main provisions of dialectical materialism can be distinguished:
The main question of philosophy is decided in favor of being (being determines consciousness);
Consciousness is understood not as an independent entity, but as a property of matter to reflect itself;
Matter is in constant motion and development;
There is no God, He is an ideal image, the fruit of human imagination to explain phenomena that are incomprehensible to mankind, and gives mankind (especially its ignorant part) consolation and hope; God has no influence on the surrounding reality;
Matter is eternal and infinite, periodically takes on new forms of its existence;
An important factor in development is practice - the transformation by a person of the surrounding reality and the transformation by a person of the person himself;
Development occurs according to the laws of dialectics - the unity and struggle of opposites, the transition of quantity into quality, the negation of negation.
15) PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Philosophy of life: A. Schopenhauer. F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson.
According to the representatives (F. Nietzsche, W. Dilthey, G. Simmel, A. Bergson, O. Spengler and others) of this school, the development of the world and man is based not on a rational basis, but on an irrational reality - “life” as “creative evolution ”, an integral organic “flow” (“impulse”, “duration”), in which matter and consciousness, conscious and unconscious, logic and intuition are inseparable. And this constantly changing stream of life is inexplicable within the framework of rationalism, positivism and mechanism of the previous philosophy. Such theses-symbols of rationalism as “I think, therefore I exist”, “everything that is real is reasonable” are rejected in the new philosophical paradigm. Life and mind are not identical concepts! Life is a process, free spontaneous and instinctive creativity, - it does not lend itself to scientific analysis, in which the subject (man) and life itself (the object of knowledge) are opposed. Life cannot be known, being outside of it, it can be "grabbed" intuitively, "get used", "feel" and "experience". The main thing in life is not matter, but spirit, therefore, the “sciences of the spirit”, and not the “sciences of nature” come to the fore: music, poetry, myth, metaphor, symbol, etc.
The irrationalism of A. Schopenhauer. The world, according to Schopenhauer, is not based on the principles of reason. There is no mind at all in the world, everything in it is subject to will. Will is the “impulse” that exists in nature and in society. In the animal world, this is the desire to preserve life, in the physical world there is “attraction”, gravity, magnetism, in society there is the will of states, peoples and individuals, the will is “spilled”
in nature and society. Will gives rise to all phenomena and processes in the world, but it itself is groundless and causeless. The will is blind and has no rational purpose. It appears as an aimless need to survive.
At the human level, will exists in the form of passions (affects): lust for power, revenge, love, etc. If the basis of the world - "will" -is unreasonable, then the world is not reasonable either. The story is meaningless, there is no rational basis in it. Science constantly comes to a standstill when it tries to justify the world from the laws of reason. The world has not become a better place because of the development of science and technology. The latter become a great evil. Time is hostile to man, it is ruthless and inexorable. In religion, man tries to conquer time through the idea of the immortality of the soul. But this is an illusion. Space is also hostile to man, it separates people.
In general, the life of people is a hopeless long extinction and grief. The meaning of life is to understand that the world is sorrow. A person can live with dignity by eradicating the “will to live” in himself, by eliminating the affects caused by the “will”. A person can give meaning to his life by getting rid of the "will to live" Schopenhauer refers to the provisions of ancient Indian philosophy, calling a person to deny the illusory world, in the pursuit of nirvana. The philosopher comes to pessimistic conclusions about the powerlessness of man and the hopelessness of his life and attempts to know the laws of nature and society. There is even no talk of any construction of a reasonable and happy state, and even more so of moral progress in society.
F. Nietzsche is an outstanding German philosopher who shocked contemporary philosophical thought with his statements. The essence of his views is a hymn to a strong man. He considered himself a student of Schopenhauer and shared his irrationalism. The world is an eternal formation, an eternal stream in which everything returns to normal. A person should not be afraid of death, because the world repeats itself in time with minor changes. The world is life. The basis of life, according to Nietzsche, is the will to power or the desire for self-affirmation of all living things. The purpose of philosophy is to help a person adapt to the world around him and realize himself - to assert himself.
In order to survive a person must be strong. It is this position that explains Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity - the ideology of the weak - slaves, not masters (of life). Christianity preaches humility, compassion, patience, meekness, non-violence.
However, these moral principles have not been accepted for a long time as a guide to action in society by those who really want to achieve something in life - and achieve it. Christian morality is “the sum of the conditions for the preservation of poor, semi-successful and completely unsuccessful types of man,” writes F. Nietzsche. Christianity is dead (God is dead!), it is not capable - and never was able - to be a guide for people. European culture is a culture of pampered people, and Christianity is to blame for this.
F. Nietzsche calls for a "revaluation of values", for replacing the morality of slaves with the morality of masters - "supermen". The philosopher contrasts the "simple man" and the "aristocrats of the spirit." Ordinary people are worthless, weak, half-hearted, soft-bodied, unable to create and rule, they are slaves by nature and can only obey. "Superman" is a being of the highest biotype. He is absolutely free, is outside the generally accepted (Christian) moral norms, outside good and evil. His morality implies the art of commanding, breadth of will, truthfulness, fearlessness, hatred of cowardice and cowardice, confidence in the deceit of the common people, cruelty in overcoming the total lie of earthly existence. The "Superman" is neither a hero nor a great man. This is an absolutely new breed of people, which has not yet been in the world - the fruit of the development of all mankind, not some separate nation. The "Superman" will transform the future culture and morality of mankind, will give the peoples new myths instead of the old ones. The "weak" must perish and make way for a new generation of "superhumans". Nietzsche opposes European rationalism, opposing feelings and instincts to it: reason is essentially insignificant, logic is absurd, because deals with frozen forms that contradict the dynamics of life. There is no truth. Knowledge is always nothing more than a subjective interpretation of facts. A person "interprets" the big world, creating his own "small" world of illusions.
Henri Bergson is the founder of intuitionism. Life as a formation begins as a result of the initial explosion ("life impulse") and acts as a stream of qualitative changes.
The initial explosion brought to life intellect and intuition as forms of life and knowledge. “Evolution later led to their mutual alienation, the acquisition of opposite qualities.
Life also breaks up - into spirit and matter. Life can only be known intuitively, sympathetically. At the same time, all opposites are removed, including between the knowable and the knower.
Life seems to know itself. Intuition grasps the living through "durations" - subjectively experienced states of life. The intellect cognizes dead things that have lost "duration" in exchange for spatial fixation.
16) PHILOSOPHY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
philosophical knowledge of this century has undergone a significant evolution, which can be characterized by a number of distinctive features.
the departure of philosophy from narrow, predominantly rationalistic philosophizing, focused on certain political views and religious (atheistic) beliefs, towards increasingly pluralistic and tolerant philosophizing, based on the principles of meeting or dialogue
· Philosophy of the 20th century, resolving important issues such as the relationship between knowledge and understanding, between knowledge and evaluation, between knowledge and truth. This moved philosophy forward not only in the traditional field, but also helped to find new fields of research.
A feature of the philosophy of the 20th century is that it long and painfully freed itself from ideological pressure, from the thesis that dominated for decades about the fierce struggle between materialism and idealism, the inseparable connection between the advanced class and advanced philosophical theory. Especially in the countries of the socialist camp. For decades, researchers have not had the opportunity to deal with those questions of philosophy that were of particular interest to them and to explain certain phenomena without many references to the works of the "founders of Marxism" and party documents.
· A feature of philosophical knowledge of the 20th century is its clear determination by the scientific apparatus of modern natural science (computer, computer, methods of mathematical sciences, systems approach, principles of synergetics). The philosophical knowledge of the 20th century is characterized by evolution towards the study of the problems of the essence and existence of man.
Philosophy of the 20th century opens and develops new areas of philosophizing, such as the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of technology, the philosophy of life, etc.
Philosophy of the 20th century put forward as the most significant and priority problems of our time a whole cycle of global problems that can be combined into one - this is the problem of the survival of mankind, inextricably linked with a new solution to the eternal question of philosophy - what is the meaning of life and the purpose of man.
· Philosophy of the 20th century - together with the entire spiritual culture of the modern world, seeks to help a person in his search for truth, in finding the real, and not the false meaning of life, in finding his Self and realizing his creative potential. Modern philosophy does not impose a single point of view on the world, presenting it as the ultimate truth. The philosophy of the end of the 20th century gave man the freedom to choose his worldview. Modern man is free in his choice. Even a brief review of the development of philosophical knowledge in the twentieth century leaving us shows how dramatically philosophical thought has evolved over the past century.
The philosophy of the 20th century is a diverse and fruitfully developing philosophizing of mankind about the fundamental problems of the existence of Nature, Cosmos, Mankind and Man
17) FREUDISM IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Freudianism is a direction named after the Austrian psychologist Z. Freud, which explains the development and structure of the personality by irrational, mental factors antagonistic to consciousness and uses the technique of psychotherapy based on these ideas. The philosophy of psychoanalysis is one of the most famous trends in European philosophy of the 20th century, which had the most significant impact not only on many philosophical schools, but on the entire spiritual culture - art and literature, theater and music, political and social doctrines.
The founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud is a psychiatrist, the successors of his philosophical traditions Carl Gustav Jung, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm were also practicing psychoanalysts, but the philosophy of psychoanalysis is wider than the utilitarian goal of medical care. In addition to the dynamic concept of the psyche and the creation of effective methods for treating neuroses, psychoanalysis formed many concepts and original hypotheses related to the problems of philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of life, made conclusions far beyond the scope of medical activity that caused a lot of controversy that has not stopped to this day. .
Freud's work, if we talk about its philosophical aspect, can be divided into two stages. The first concerns the creation of the concept of the unconscious (end of the 19th century - until 1920), when, on the basis of experimental data, he concludes that there are quite clearly defined structural formations in the psyche of each person, which are characterized as consciousness, preconsciousness and the unconscious. In contrast to the rationalist European philosophical tradition, Freud pays special attention to the unconscious, defining it as that part of the psyche into which the unconscious desires of a person, which are irrational and timeless, are forced out. The realization of these desires and ideas is hindered by that part of the psyche, which Freud called the preconscious. It censors the desires that characterize the unconscious aspirations of a person, here is the source of a person’s conflict with himself, since the unconscious is subject to the principle of pleasure, and the preconscious is considered primarily with reality. Its task is to curb the desires of the unconscious, to prevent them from penetrating into consciousness and being realized in some kind of activity, since they can become the source of neurotic behavior.
The main conclusion of the philosophy of psychoanalysis: the entire human culture was created on the basis of a biologically determined process of transformation of a person's sexual instinct into other, sublimated activities. This allowed him to characterize European culture as a culture created by neurotics, people whose normal sexual desires were repressed and then transformed into substitute activities.
At the second stage of creativity (1920-1939), Freud clarifies the concept of the unconscious, including in the sphere of instinctive impulses the primary cosmic urges - Eros and Thanatos (life and death). The most significant development of this period is the dynamic concept of the human psyche, which includes such structures as the id, the ego, and the superego. It, according to Freud, is a boiling cauldron of instincts, giving rise to all subsequent contradictions and difficulties of a person. The structure of the I is called upon to realize (forbid) the impulses of the It, coordinating them with the requirements of the social reality in which a person lives, and the super-I acts as a judge, a public overseer of the entire human psyche, correlating his thoughts and actions with the norms and patterns existing in society behavior. Each of the "floors" of the human psyche lives its own life, but the realization of the fruits of their activity is most often distorted, because a person's life in society is subordinated not to his bioenergetics, but to the cultural environment in which he is included. All European culture, according to Freud, is a culture of prohibition, and all the main taboos concern precisely unconscious impulses, therefore the development of culture involves the development of neuroses and misfortunes of people, leads to an increase in the guilt of each person, the rejection of one's own desires.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) - Swiss physician, psychologist and philosopher, worked for a number of years with Freud as a practicing physician and at the same time as one of the adherents of the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Later, Jung diverged from Freud in his views on the nature of the unconscious, on the understanding of libido, on the primary forms of human adaptation to the world of society around him.
Analyzing the unconscious, Jung considers it unlawful to reduce all mental impulses of the id to sexuality, to interpret libido only as the energy of drives, and even more so to derive the entire European culture from the sublimations of the individual. Jung characterizes as libido all manifestations of vital energy perceived by a person as an unconscious desire or desire. He shows that a person's libido undergoes a series of complex transformations throughout life, often very far from sexuality; moreover, it can transform and come back due to some life circumstances, which leads to the reproduction in the human mind of a number of archaic images and experiences associated with the primary forms of human life even in the preliterate era. On this basis, Jung creates a cultural concept based on understanding the unconscious first of all as collective and impersonal, and only then as subjective and individualized. The collective unconscious manifests itself in the form of cultural archetypes that cannot be described, comprehended and adequately reflected in linguistic forms. In this sense, Jung claims to create a new type of rationality that is not amenable to traditional European logicism.
Exploring the relationship between individual and social being of a person, Jung comes to the conclusion that in the history of mankind this problem is expressed in different ways, depending on the specifics of Eastern and Western cultures. The East, with its mystical wheel of life, reincarnation and transmigration of souls, forms a person with the absolutization of the collective unconscious, belittling any personal principle in a person. Western culture, as it developed by the 19th century, is characterized by the predominance of rationality, practicality and scientificity in all spheres of life, and the Protestant morality that prevails in many European countries, based on individualism and elevating the subject, is marked by disregard for the collectively unconscious foundations of culture. The appeal of European culture to achievement, success, to personal victory leads to a serious breakdown of the human psyche.
From the concept of the archetypes of culture, a theory of mentality a little later grows, which is successfully developed in modern humanities. The word "mentality" (from Latin mens - way of thinking) denotes a set of attitudes and predispositions of a person, social group, ethnic group to feel, think and act in a certain way. The mentality presupposes not only the existence of certain traditions and norms of culture, it also includes the collective unconscious, which in a certain way influences the actions of people and their understanding of reality.
18. Analytical philosophy. Neopositivism
Analytic philosophy is an Anglo-American tradition of philosophy that became widespread in the middle of the 20th century. Analytic philosophy does not represent a single school, since although it was formed on the basis of British neo-realism (Moore and Russell), it also absorbed Austrian neo-positivism (through Ayer and Quine) and American pragmatism (Peirce, Morris). From positivism, it borrows an anti-metaphysical orientation (criticism of philosophical "pseudo-problems"), scientism and reliance on empirical knowledge, and from pragmatism - common sense. Term analytical indicates the ideals of clarity, accuracy and logical rigor of thinking, which the representatives of this direction of philosophy strive to implement.
This philosophical direction, in essence, proposes to change the subject of philosophy. Analytic philosophy is the philosophy of the language and meanings of concepts. in a broad sense, af can be qualified as a certain style of philosophical thinking. it is characterized, for example, by such qualities as rigor, the accuracy of the terminology used, a cautious attitude towards broad philosophical generalizations, all kinds of abstractions and speculative judgments. for philosophers of analytical orientation (orientation), the process of argumentation itself is sometimes no less important than the result achieved with its help.
At the same time, reasoned persuasiveness, logical conclusions are given a clear preference over their emotional impact.
As a special philosophical trend, neopositivism has become widespread in English-speaking countries. Its most famous representatives are R. Carnap, A. Ayer, B. Russell, L. Wittgenstein, J. Austin and others. Many very different theories are united under the general name of neopositivism: from logical positivism, logical empiricism and logical atomism to the philosophy of linguistic analysis and various areas of analytical philosophy, linked with the theory of critical rationalism.
Logical positivism proclaimed its main task to be the fight against metaphysics, traditionally understanding it as philosophy as a whole, striving to place itself above the struggle between materialism and idealism. Its theoretical source was the real development of physics, logic, mathematics, linguistics and empirical sociology, which directly led to the question of theoretical activity as an activity associated only with the logical language of science: science is reduced to fixing and then ordering facts within the framework of a conditionally accepted system of language . In this case, the task of science is limited to the description of its language. Logical positivism considered events and facts to be the initial prerequisites for any knowledge, i.e. "sense data" located in the sphere of consciousness of the subject. One of the features of this current is that it fundamentally identified the object with the theory of the object. This immediately removed the question of the existence of the objective world as a subject of philosophical knowledge and led to the closure of philosophy only on the cognitive problems of logic and logical language, especially since the logico-mathematical language was traditionally considered a model of reliable knowledge. Another fundamental feature was the identification (or rather, replacement) of the concepts of “objective fact” and “scientific fact”. The latter was understood as “recorded” in science with the help of symbolic means, i.e. as a "protocol proposal". The language of science in logical positivism is built in such a way that complex statements are deduced from primary atomic statements according to the rules of logic. At the same time, the proposals of science can be either true, or false, or meaningless. Meaningless sentences, according to R. Carnap, are not sentences in the proper sense of the word, but only resemble them in form. An example of such a sentence would be: “the moon multiplies quadrangularly.” All philosophical propositions, Carnap believed, are also meaningless statements, since, being general propositions, they cannot be verified, verified by reduction to atomic statements fixing this or that “fact”. Since on this basis it is impossible to verify (verify empirically) also moral statements containing the general concepts of "good" and "evil", insofar as logical positivists deduced, for example, ethics beyond science. The disadvantage of the principle of verification in the system of logical positivism is that it does not follow from experience and cannot be obtained analytically. Of course, the analysis of language is important and necessary for science. But it is expedient only when the rules for the use of scientific terms, the rules for combining words in sentences and the rules for deriving others from one sentence reveal the connections and relations of objective reality. Neopositivists, on the other hand, consider all these rules on their own, in isolation from the objective world. Turning to semiotic problems, they singled out three areas of relations: pragmatics (the relation of the language to the one who uses it); semantics (the relationship between language and what it denotes); syntax (relationship between language expressions). All this is called semiotics. The subject of analysis was the meaning of words and signs in general, logical, linguistic and psychological problems of great scientific and practical importance (for example, for the creation of computer technology, the development of machine languages, etc.). In its development, neopositivism came to describe the diverse ways of using words and expressions as various “language games”, which led to a revision of the status of knowledge: philosophical and scientific systems turned out to be nothing more than language formations that have the character of a game. Moreover, this game has a conventional (conditional) character.
Neo-positivism evolved away from analysis. the language of science to the analysis of ordinary language and from the denial of philosophy to the use of the analytical method for a more or less meaningful analysis of philosophical problems proper - to the development, for example, of modeling methods, system-structural analysis, etc. This philosophical trend still continues to hold its positions, although and heavily modified.
Material for simple reading, maybe he will ask about it:
Neo-positivism, like the two previous stages of positivism, begins its struggle for a "genuine" philosophy with a critique of metaphysics. Neopositivists reproach traditional philosophy for vagueness of reasoning, excessive complexity of the language. Philosophy, according to neopositivists, must be radically transformed, it must be subject to the requirements that have developed in modern natural science and mathematics.
It should be noted that neopositivism is heterogeneous: as a philosophical trend, it consists of a number of philosophical schools and has gone through a number of successive stages in its development. Historically, the first and main variant of neopositivism is logical positivism. According to neopositivist philosophers, philosophy does not have an object of study, because it is not a meaningful science about some kind of reality, but is a kind of activity, a special way of theorizing.
Representatives of logical positivism believe that the task of philosophy is reduced to a logical analysis of scientific statements and generalizations. At the same time, neopositivists proceed from the premises that all knowledge is expressed using a language consisting of its elementary components - simple ("atomic") and complex, which, in turn, consist of simple ("molecular") judgments. The central task of philosophy is to develop principles for testing these propositions against their positively given human experience.
Logical atomism, developed by B. Russell and A. Whitehead in the book "Principles of Mathematics", identified the structure of the world with the structure of mathematical logic. B. Russell put forward the position that all statements are divided into three main categories: 1) logical-mathematical (analytical); 2) empirical (synthetic); 3) metaphysical (scientifically meaningless). Further, R. Carnap introduced a classification of sentences, dividing them into meaningless, scientifically meaningless (extra-scientific), scientifically meaningful (scientific). Thus, R. Carnap limited the task of philosophy to the logical analysis of the language, its syntax. Syntax studies the internal structure of sign systems, the rules for their construction, regardless of the functions they perform. Thus, philosophy was reduced to a theory of linguistic forms, a set of formal rules independent of the meaning of words and sentences.
Later, convinced of the limitations of the syntactic approach, the neopositivists came to the conclusion that a semantic analysis of the language is necessary. Semantics is a branch of linguistics that studies problems related to the meaning, meaning and interpretation of knowledge and sign expressions.
To test the scientific character of statements, logical positivism put forward the principle of verification (truth), i.e., any theoretical scientific knowledge is subject to experimental verification of truth.
For example, 2 × 2 = 4 is a sentence of a logical-mathematical construction, and the sentence “There are 50 people in the audience” is of an empirical type, since all those sitting in the audience can be counted. All other sentences are either erroneous, that is, they are constructed in violation of the rules of syntax, or metaphysical, that is, they are not scientifically comprehended. Metaphysical are all those sentences that claim to represent knowledge about something that is beyond all experience, about reality, the essence of things, for example, that the basis of the world is water, etc.
Thus, neopositivists interpreted truth as the coincidence of statements with direct human experience. However, in the course of research, it turned out that many statements of science cannot be reduced to experience, that is, subjected to verification, and that the principle of verification itself is not verifiable.
The neopositivists tried to find a way out of this difficulty by replacing the principle of verification with the principle of verifiability: the proposition is true if its fundamental verification is possible, and then this principle was also replaced by the principle of verifiability: partial empirical verification is possible.
The development of analytical philosophy has shown the failure of attempts to eliminate specific philosophical questions from science and reduce philosophy to the methodology of scientific knowledge. In the last decades of the XX century. within analytic philosophy there is a growing interest in the problems of metaphysics, in ontological, epistemological and general sociological problems. The crisis within analytic philosophy was largely associated with the emergence of post-positivist philosophy.
19) Existentialism.
1) General concepts of existentialism.
Existentialism is a direction of philosophy, the main subject of which is a person, his problems, difficulties, existence in the world around him.
Existentialism as a direction of philosophy began to emerge in the middle of the twentieth century, and in the 20s - 70s of the twentieth century. acquired relevance and became one of the popular philosophical trends in Western Europe.
2. Factors that contributed to the emergence and development of existentialism.
Actualization and flourishing of existentialism in the 20s - 70s. 20th century contributed to the following reasons:
the moral, economic and political crises that engulfed mankind before the First World War, during the First and Second World Wars and between them;
the rapid growth of science and technology and the use of technical achievements to the detriment of man (improvement of military equipment, machine guns, machine guns, mines, bombs, the use of poisonous substances in the course of hostilities, etc.);
the danger of the death of mankind (the invention and use of nuclear weapons, the approaching ecological catastrophe);
increased cruelty, inhuman treatment of man (70 million dead in two world wars, concentration camps, labor camps);
the spread of fascist and other totalitarian regimes that completely suppress the human personality;
impotence of man before nature by technogenic society.
3. The main problems considered by existentialism.
Existentialist philosophy spread in response to these phenomena. We can distinguish the following problems that philosophers - existentialists paid attention to:
the uniqueness of the human personality, the depth of his feelings, experiences, anxieties, hopes, life in general;
a striking contradiction between the human inner world and the surrounding life;
the problem of alienation of a person (society, the state have become absolutely alien to a person, a reality that completely neglects a person, suppresses his “I”);
the problem of loneliness, abandonment of a person (a person is lonely in the world around him, he does not have a “coordinate system” where he would feel needed);
the problem of meaninglessness of life;
the problem of internal choice;
the problem of a person’s search for both his inner “I” and his outer one - a place in life.
4. The philosophy of Sjoren Kierkegaard is the birth of existentialism.
The Danish philosopher Sjøren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is considered the founder of existentialism.
He raised the question: why does philosophy deal with so many different questions - the essence of being, matter, God, spirit, limits and mechanisms of cognition - and pays almost no attention to a person, moreover, dissolves a specific person with his inner world, experiences in universal, abstract , as a rule, issues that are not of interest to him and do not concern his daily life?
Kierkegaard believed that philosophy should turn to a person, his little problems, help him find the truth that he understands, for which he could live, help a person make an inner choice and realize his "I".
The best representatives of existentialism of the twentieth century were:
Karl Jasper (1883 - 1969);
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980);
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960);
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976).
5. Philosophy of K. Jaspers.
Karl Jasper (1883 - 1969) - a German philosopher - was one of the first to raise existentialist problems in the twentieth century. (in the book "Psychology of worldviews", published in 1919 - after the end of the First World War).
According to Jasper, a person usually lives an "abandoned" life that does not have much meaning - "like everyone else." At the same time, he does not even suspect who he really is, does not know his hidden abilities, capabilities, true "I". However, in special cases, the true nature, these hidden qualities come out. According to Jasper, these are borderline situations - between life and death, especially important for a person, his future destiny. From that moment on, a person realizes himself and becomes himself, he comes into contact with transcendence - the highest being.
The whole life of a person, consciously or unconsciously, is directed towards transcendence - towards the complete liberation of energy and the understanding of some higher absolute.
A person approaches transcendence, the absolute, releases energy, realizes himself through the so-called "ciphers" of the transcendental:
erotica, sex;
unity of oneself with one's own inner world (consent with oneself);
death is the end of life.
6. Philosophy J.P. Sartre.
The main problem of the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) is the problem of choice.
The central concept of Sartre's philosophy is "being-for-itself".
“Being-for-itself” is the highest reality for a person, the priority for him is, first of all, his own inner world. However, a person can become fully aware of himself only through “for-other-being” - various relationships with other people. A person sees and perceives himself through the attitude of the “other” towards him.
The most important condition of human life, its “core”, the basis of activity is freedom.
A person finds his freedom and manifests it in a choice, but not a simple, secondary one (for example, what clothes to wear today), but in a vital, fateful one, when decisions cannot be avoided (issues of life and death, extreme situations, vital problems for a person) . Sartre calls this kind of decision an existential choice. Having made an existential choice, a person determines his destiny for many years to come, passes from one existence to another.
All life is a chain of various "small lives", segments of different existence, connected by special "knots" - existential decisions. For example: choosing a profession, choosing a spouse, choosing a job, deciding to change a profession, deciding to take part in a struggle, go to war, etc.
According to Sartre, human freedom is absolute (that is, irrelevant). Man is free insofar as he is able to will. For example, a prisoner sitting in prison is free as long as he wants something: escape from prison, stay longer, commit suicide. A person is doomed to freedom (in any circumstances, except for the case of complete submission to external reality, but this is also a choice).
Along with the problem of freedom comes the problem of responsibility. A person is responsible for everything that he does, for himself (“Everything that happens to me is mine”).
The only thing a person cannot be responsible for is his own birth. However, in all other respects, he is completely free and must responsibly dispose of freedom, especially with an existential (fateful) choice.
7. Philosophy of A. Camus.
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) made the problem of the meaning of life the main problem of his existential philosophy.
The main thesis of the philosopher is that human life is essentially meaningless.
Most people live their little worries, joys, from Monday to Sunday, year after year and do not give their lives a purposeful meaning. Those who fill life with meaning, spend energy, rush forward, sooner or later understand that ahead (where they go with all their might) is death, Nothing. Everyone is mortal - both those who fill life with meaning and those who do not. Human life is an absurdity (in translation - unfounded).
Camus gives two main proofs of the absurdity, groundlessness of life:
contact with death - in contact with death, especially close and sudden, much that previously seemed important to a person - hobbies, career, wealth - loses its relevance and seems meaningless, not worth being itself;
contact with the surrounding world, nature - a person is helpless in front of nature that has existed for millions of years (“I smell the grass and see the stars, but no knowledge on Earth can give me confidence that the world is mine”).
As a result, the meaning of life, according to Camus, is not in the external world (successes, failures, relationships), but in the very existence of a person.
8. Philosophy of M. Heidegger.
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) was engaged in the development of the very foundations of an existentialist understanding of the subject and tasks of philosophy.
Existence, according to Heidegger, is a being to which a person refers himself, the fullness of a person's being with specifics; his life is in what belongs to him and what exists for him.
The existence of a person takes place in the surrounding world (called by the philosopher “being in the world”). In turn, "being in the world" consists of:
"being with others";
"being oneself".
"Being with others" sucks a person, is aimed at his complete assimilation, depersonalization, transformation into "like everyone else."
“Being oneself” simultaneously with “being with others” is possible only if the “I” is distinguished from others.
Consequently, a person, wishing to remain himself, must resist the "others", lag behind his identity. Only then will he be free.
Defending one's identity in the surrounding world that absorbs a person is the main problem and concern of a person.
20. Postmodernism in the philosophy of the XX century.
Similar information.
General characteristics of classical German philosophy; its place in the history of world philosophy.
Philosophy of I. Kant.
Philosophy I.G. Fichte.
Philosophy of F. Schelling.
The system and method of the philosophical teachings of G. Hegel.
Anthropological materialism L. Feuerbach.
1. Classical German philosophy is considered to be the development of philosophy in Germany during the second half of the 18th - the first half of the 19th centuries, when a succession of systems of philosophical idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and Feuerbach's materialism were created. The evolution of German classical philosophy is as follows: from subjective idealism (Kant, Fichte) to objective idealism (Schelling, Hegel), and then to materialism (Feuerbach). With the advent of this philosophy, the center of philosophical creativity moved from England and France to Germany. And although Germany was still an extremely backward, fragmented country in socio-economic and political respects, in philosophy and art it reached the forefront. The British and French carried out bourgeois revolutionary transformations in practice. German philosophers have succeeded in mental transformations.
2. The ancestor of classical German philosophy was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant was born in the city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad), in the family of a craftsman. His whole life was spent in this city, and his scientific activity - at the University of Koenigsberg, where he went from student to rector. Physically weak from birth, Kant, thanks to the regime of the day, order in everything, purposefulness, eventually became the officially recognized philosopher No. 1 in Germany.
Kant's philosophical work is usually divided into two periods: before and after 1770. The first of them is “subcritical”, the second is “critical”. In the "pre-critical" period, the philosopher stands on the positions of natural-scientific materialism. In 1755, he wrote a treatise "The General Natural History and Theory of the Sky", in which he put forward a hypothesis about the emergence of the solar system (and similarly about the emergence of the entire universe) from a gas and dust nebula, the particles of which, consolidating and swirling, led to the formation of celestial bodies. This hypothesis later became known as the Kant-Laplace theory. In this work, Kant practically denies the idea of the creation of the world by a higher power, introduces the concept of historicism into the field of natural sciences and proudly exclaims: “Give me matter and I will build their world!”
In the "critical" period (since 1770) Kant named his main works as follows: "Critique of Pure Reason", "Critique of Practical Reason", "Critique of Judgment". In them, from the positions of materialism, he moves to the positions of subjective idealism. Thus, space and time are now interpreted by Kant not as objective forms of the external world (as, for example, in Newton), but as a priori, i.e. pre-experienced forms of sensory contemplation inherent in consciousness. Kant now calls all previous philosophy dogmatic, blindly believing in the abilities of the mind, although no one has tested these abilities (boundaries) of the mind. "Criticism" - and there is such a test. Kant asks himself the following questions: “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? (the fourth, or rather, generalizing all three questions: "What is a person?").
The process of cognition, according to Kant, goes through three stages: 1) sensory cognition; 2) reason; 3) mind. The initial premise is formulated materialistically: the existence of an external objective world (the so-called “things-in-themselves”) is recognized. But Kant divides what is outside of us into the world of phenomena (appearances) perceived by the senses, and the world of noumena (entities), which are in no way cognizable (but only intelligible, that is, a philosopher can generally assume their existence). So, feelings do not penetrate into the world of essences, the mind only arranges objects, and the human mind is weak, it is split (antinomic). The mind makes apparently contradictory judgments. The four antinomies of Kant are as follows: 1) The world has a beginning in time and is limited in space. – The world has no beginning and is infinite in space. 2) Any complex substance consists of indivisible simple parts. – Not a single thing consists of simple parts, and in general there is nothing simple in the world; it is divisible ad infinitum. 3) Everything in the world is free; there is no causality. – Everything in the world has its own reason, there is no spontaneity, there is no freedom; everything is determined. 4) God exists. - There is no god. Any part of the antinomy can neither be proved nor disproved.
In ethics, Kant criticized eudemonism. His ethics is rigorous, in which the most important category of morality is duty as a command of good will. Kant formulated the law of eternal world morality in the form of a categorical imperative (unconditional command). Here are two formulations of this command: 1) Act in such a way that the maxim (general rule) of your will can at the same time have the force of the principle of universal legislation; 2) Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person of everyone else, as an end or an end in itself, and never treat it only as a means.
Kant's aesthetics is of great importance. In it, he gave a deep analysis of a number of aesthetic categories ("affection", "game", "sublime", etc.). Kant's general definition of the beautiful is as follows: "The beautiful is that which pleases without any concepts at all." The philosopher associates the beautiful with “disinterested”, disinterested, pure contemplation: the feeling of beauty is free from the thirst for possession, from any thoughts of desire, and therefore it is higher than all other feelings.
Kant was a resolute opponent of wars between peoples. He wrote a treatise "On Eternal Peace", in which he proposed the widest interaction of countries (in the economy, trade, exchange of people and ideas), in which the concept of "alien" would lose its meaning and people would not be able to fight each other. Unfortunately, this ideal of the German thinker has not yet been fully realized.
3. A fairly original representative of classical German philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), also a subjective idealist. Kant helped him in his scientific career, since their views coincided rather than diverged.
Fichte called his philosophy "scientific learning" (the science of science). His main work is called "The basis of general science". He insists on a practical-active attitude towards the world. He introduces the concept of “activity” into the system of philosophy and declares: “Act! Act! This is what we exist for.” He introduces into his system as the central concept "I", which he considers not as a pure subject, but as a subject-object. The external world for Fichte is the “non-I”, which includes the objective world and other people and which also has activity. The philosopher puts forward the formula: "I" creates "not-I". Despite the subjectivity of this formula, it contains a rational element: a person really changes, transforms everything around him (creates a world of created things, gives birth to children, educates others, modifies social institutions, etc.).
In epistemology, Fichte develops the antithetical (dialectical) method, the principle of development. “There is nothing permanent anywhere, there is only continuous change,” he says. The core of Fichte's dialectic is contradiction. Fichte considered freedom to be the goal of human activity, and, in his opinion, it is realized in an endless process. Fichte attached particular importance to the free, creative, vigorous activity of people who seek to systematize the whole world on scientific foundations. He himself was a very active person. Thus, during the period of the occupation of the German territories by the Napoleonic armies, he boldly advocated the liberation of the country, and these speeches formed the basis of his patriotic work - “Speech to the German Nation”.
4. Unlike Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) developed an objective-idealistic system of philosophy. His most important works: “On the Self as a Principle of Philosophy”, “Ideas of the Philosophy of Nature”, “The System of Transcendental Idealism”, “Philosophy of Religion”, “Philosophy of Art”, etc. In his youth, in his student years, Schelling was friends with Hegel. Both of them enthusiastically met the French bourgeois revolution and on this occasion they solemnly planted the "tree of freedom" together. In the future, their paths diverged, and Schelling accused the former friend of plagiarism: he allegedly assigned himself priority in the doctrine of the identity of being and thinking (“the philosophy of identity”).
Schelling really put forward the idea that being is permeated with reason, and therefore, fundamentally, thinking and being are in unity (of course, Schelling, as an idealist, considers thinking to be substantial). But he did not succeed in developing this idea as Hegel did. Later, in adulthood, Schelling was more concerned with the problems of aesthetics and especially the problems of religion. The latter in detail gave rise to the young Engels, who listened to the master's course of lectures in Berlin, to call him "Schelling - a philosopher in Christ." Studies in Theosophy occupied the last period of Schelling's life.
Very valuable in the teachings of Schelling was the idea of the expediency of the development of nature, the presence in it of dialectical laws, the struggle of opposing forces. He was even going to write a work called "The Dialectics of Nature." This plan was not realized (but the work, although unfinished, nevertheless appeared under this title after Schelling's death; it was written by his former volunteer Friedrich Engels).
5. The greatest philosopher, representative and developer of the system of objective idealism, was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). In his youth, he enthusiastically read Plato, Herder, Schiller, Kant, Montesquieu, but his favorite philosopher was the ideologist of democracy and the revolutionary upheaval, J.-J. Rousseau. He graduated from the University of Tübingen, worked as a home teacher, director of a gymnasium, taught at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1818 at the University of Berlin as a professor (for some time he was rector) until the end of his life.
Main works: "Science of Logic: In Three Volumes" (1812-1816) - this is the so-called "Great Logic" along with "Small Logic" as the first part of the "Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences" (1817); "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1807); "Lectures on the History of Philosophy", "Lectures on Aesthetics", "Philosophy of History", "Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion".
The most valuable in Hegel's philosophy was the dialectic developed by him in a systematic, holistic form. To everything in the world, he applies the principle of universal connection and the principle of development. Dialectics is most fully expounded by Hegel in the Science of Logic. The philosopher fully revealed the role and significance of the dialectical method in cognition and other forms of social activity, and criticized the metaphysical method of thinking.
Hegel's system includes 3 parts:
Philosophy of nature
Philosophy of spirit.
Logics is the science of pure thinking, abstract ideas
Nature- the external reality of the idea.
Spirit- the return of the idea to itself.
The central, initial category of Hegelian philosophy is the absolute idea, which, in the spirit of historicism, goes through a series of steps towards its ultimate goal - self-knowledge. The elements of the absolute spirit are aesthetics, religion and, as the final stage, philosophy. In art, the absolute spirit reveals itself in the form of contemplation, in religion - in the form of representation, and in philosophy - in the form of a concept, i.e. as "thinking consideration". Philosophy Hegel puts above any other knowledge, portrays it as a "science of sciences."
In Hegel's philosophy, despite its fundamental nature, there are many contradictions. Thus, when considering such a stage of the absolute idea as nature, Hegel departs from the fruitful idea of development and denies nature the ability to develop (for him it only “unfolds” in space). He defines history as "progress in the consciousness of freedom" and idealizes the Prussian constitutional monarchy, considers the "German world" the pinnacle of progressive development. Hegel puts forward a contradictory formula: “Everything that is real is reasonable; everything that is reasonable is real." The first part of the formula can be understood as the justification of any reality (according to Hegel, everything that exists has its own rational basis); the second part is essentially revolutionary: everything rational must sooner or later acquire a state of reality.
Attention is drawn to the general contradiction between the progressive, scientific dialectical method of Hegelian philosophy and the conservative philosophical system. Subsequently, various philosophers relied either on his method or on his system.
6. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872) is the only representative of materialism among the classical philosophers of Germany. Its historical significance lies in the fact that, in the conditions of the dominance of philosophical idealism, he revived the materialistic tradition, interrupted after the materialism of France in the 18th century. He studied at the University of Heidelberg, transferred to the University of Berlin, where he attended Hegel's lectures. In 1828 he defended his dissertation "On the One, Universal and Infinite Mind" at Erlaigen University and for some time taught at this university. In 1830, Feuerbach anonymously published an atheistic work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality. However, the secret of the anonymous person was revealed and Feuerbach was deprived of the right to teach. But Feuerbach did not stop his scientific activity. In 1836, he married and for a quarter of a century lived almost without a break in the village of Bruckberg, where his beautiful wife was a co-owner of a small porcelain factory. “I spent the best part of my life not in the pulpit, but in the temple of nature, in the countryside.”
The main works of Ludwig Feuerbach: "The History of New Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza", monographs on Leibniz, Beil, "On the Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy", "The Essence of Christianity" (1841, this is a triumph of the philosopher's work), "The Fundamentals of the Philosophy of the Future", " The Essence of Religion", "Eudemonism".
Feuerbach is the first major materialist on German soil. He thought. that idealism is nothing else. as a rationalized religion, and philosophy and religion are opposed to each other. Religion is based on belief in dogmas, and philosophy is based on knowledge. It must be understood that man is not a creation of God, but a creation of nature. Religion arises in the darkness of ignorance. The source of religion must be sought in man (due to limitations, fear of natural phenomena, etc.). It is based on feeling dependencies human: first from nature, and then from other people. Religion promises the fulfillment of desires. Only unfortunate people need it. "We must replace the love of God with love for man as the only true religion."
At the center of Feuerbach's teaching is man as "... the only, universal and highest subject of philosophy." In this regard, Feuerbach's philosophical doctrine is called anthropological materialism (Feuerbach himself avoided the word matter and materialism). Man, according to Feuerbach, is a material object and at the same time a thinking subject. Human nature in his interpretation is predominantly biological.
Feuerbach sharply criticized Hegel's objective idealism. He sees the main vice of idealism in the identification of being and thinking. “Thought being is not real being,” he writes. “The image of this being outside of thinking is matter, the substratum of reality.” Feuerbach's philosophy is based on the principle: "Being is the subject, thinking is the predicate." In the theory of knowledge, the philosopher continued the line of materialistic sensationalism.
Speaking against Hegelian idealism, Feuerbach also rejected the valuable thing that was contained in Hegel's teaching - namely, dialectics. Because of this, his own philosophical teaching turned out to be largely metaphysical.
In ethics, Feuerbach stands on the position of eudemonism. He considers love to be the main quality of a person. Of the types of love, in the first place puts the relationship between "I" and "You", between a man and a woman. Feuerbach is a supporter of eudemonism. In the doctrine of morality, he defended the concept of a non-historical person. He believed that where morality is established on theology, the most shameful and immoral things are happening there.
INTRODUCTION
German classical philosophy is a significant stage in the development of philosophical thought and culture of mankind. It is represented by the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872).
Each of these philosophers created his own philosophical system, characterized by a wealth of ideas and concepts. At the same time, German classical philosophy is a single spiritual formation, which is characterized by the following common features:
1. A peculiar understanding of the role of philosophy in the history of mankind, in the development of world culture. Classical German philosophers believed that philosophy was called upon to be the critical conscience of culture, the “confronting consciousness”, “grinning at reality”, the “soul” of culture.
2. Not only human history was investigated, but also human essence. Kant sees man as a moral being. Fichte emphasizes the activity, effectiveness of consciousness and self-consciousness of a person, considers the structure of human life according to the requirements of reason. Schelling sets the task of showing the relationship between the objective and the subjective. Hegel expands the boundaries of the activity of self-consciousness and individual consciousness: the self-consciousness of the individual in him correlates not only with external objects, but also with other self-consciousness, from which various social forms arise. He deeply explores various forms of social consciousness. Feuerbach creates a new form of materialism - anthropological materialism, at the center of which is a really existing person who is a subject for himself and an object for another person. For Feuerbach, the only real things are nature and man as part of nature.
3. All representatives of classical German philosophy treated philosophy as a special system of philosophical disciplines, categories, ideas. I. Kant, for example, singles out as philosophical disciplines, first of all, epistemology and ethics. Schelling - natural philosophy, ontology. Fichte, considering philosophy a "scientific study", saw in it such sections as ontological, epistemological, socio-political. Hegel created a broad system of philosophical knowledge, which included the philosophy of nature, logic, the philosophy of history, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of morality, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of the state, the philosophy of the development of individual consciousness, etc. Feuerbach considered ontological, epistemological and ethical problems, and also philosophical problems of history and religion.
4. Classical German philosophy develops a holistic concept of dialectics.
1. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
German classical philosophy is considered a separate topic in the philosophy course, because four giants appeared in a short period of time. Philosophers are theorists who have made theoretical discoveries of such a global scale that are studied and confirmed in modern science. The founders of German classical philosophy: I. Kant was born (1724-1804). All his life he lived in the city of Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad). Fichte (1762-1814), F. Schelling (1775-1854), G. Hegel (1770-1831). Philosophers were bound by bonds of friendship and teaching. Fichte considered himself a student of Kant, Schelling was a student of Fichte. In the process of life, they parted, the friendship was interrupted.
Germany had a favorable environment for the development of science and research. By this time, a network of universities had formed in Germany. Philosophers were teachers. Universities were supported by the state in material terms. Scientific information was available to a wide range of people. The 19th century was considered the development of European philosophical thought. German philosophers turned philosophy into a professional occupation. They made an attempt to turn it into the highest form of theoretical knowledge. Philosophizing is inseparable from science. Theory is higher, more essential than any empirical contemplative being. A characteristic feature of German philosophy was the absolutization of conceptual knowledge on the basis of a special form of work with the concept. The main subject of science - the concept of German classical philosophy - appears in the ultimate form of rationalism laid down by the traditions of Plato and Aristotle. At the heart of the tradition are the thoughts: “not a person, but the world mind. The laws of reason underlie the world” (not proven - not true). The proof of truth was carried to the extreme of German classical philosophy. All German classical philosophy is characterized by a special technique of philosophizing (working with a concept). The thinking force is able to foresee, working only with the concept. Hence the conclusion follows: the intellect has purely theoretical possibilities, which is capable of even thought experiments. German classical philosophy developed the dialectical method: the world is considered as a whole, not in parts. The world is considered in motion, development. The connection between the lower and the higher has been proved. The world develops from the lowest to the highest, changes occur quantitatively and pass into a new quality. Development has an internal purpose. Hegel made a special discovery in dialectics. He suggested that there is a threefold method of thinking. For example, the thesis-antithesis is a synthesis; being - non-being - becoming. Hegel thinks speculatively, i.e. speculatively, referring to the concept, and not to experience through the unity and opposition of these concepts. Hegel starts from the simple, through the movement towards synthesis, from the abstract to the concrete, from the one-sided to the many-sided. Until the whole “fabric” of reality is obtained. His thinking corresponds to the law of logic and is subject to the unity of the logical and the historical. German classical philosophy stands on the border with modern philosophy. She was able to synthesize the idea of romanticism and enlightenment. The beginning of the Enlightenment in German philosophy is closely connected with the famous Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who systematized and popularized the teachings of H. Leibniz. Many philosophers not only in Germany, but also in Russia, for example, M.V. Lomonosov, studied with H. Wolf, who for the first time in Germany developed a system that covered the main areas of philosophical culture.
Philosophy developed in the intellectual atmosphere of progressive scientific and artistic thought. A significant role was played by the achievements of natural science and the social sciences. Physics and chemistry began to develop, and the study of organic nature advanced. Discoveries in the field of mathematics, which made it possible to understand the processes in their exact quantitative expression, the teachings of J.B. Lamarck, in fact the predecessor of Charles Darwin, about the conditionality of the development of the organism by the environment, astronomical, sharpness and inevitability brought to the fore the idea of development as a theory and method of cognition of reality.
2. KANT'S PHILOSOPHY
One of the greatest minds of mankind, the founder of German classical philosophy is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). There are two periods in Kant's philosophy. The first one is “subcritical”. At that time, he stood on the positions of natural-scientific materialism and put forward a hypothesis of the origin and development of the solar system from the original nebula on the basis of the internal mechanical laws of motion of matter. Later, this hypothesis was processed by the mathematician Laplace and received the name of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis.
In the second, “critical” period, i.e. starting from the 80s of the 18th century, Kant creates three “Critiques”: “critique of pure reason”, “critique of practical reason”, “critique of the faculty of judgment”. Kant calls his philosophy “transcendental”, i.e. beyond the realm of the empirical, beyond the realm of experience. He admits the existence of an objective reaction that is on the other side of phenomena (phenomenon). This reality is transcendent, it is a “thing in itself”, elusive (noumenon).
Kant's theory of knowledge is based on the recognition of the activity of human consciousness. In the depths of our consciousness, before experience and independently of it, there are basic categories, forms of understanding (for example, time and space). He called them a priori. The truth is not in reality, but in consciousness itself. It is precisely from itself that it creates its own forms, the method of cognition, and its object of cognition, i.e. creates the world of phenomena, nature, acts as the creator of all things. Essence is contained in “things in themselves”, it is inaccessible and objective, and phenomena are created by a priori consciousness, they are accessible, subjective.
Kant proves the impotence of the human mind by the doctrine of antinomies, i.e. opposite statements, equally true and false. To such he attributed the expressions: “the world is finite and infinite”, “freedom and necessity reign in the world”.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant shows how we should act in life. Here he makes arguments in favor of belief in God, but does not try to prove that God really exists.
Kant is the author of the categorical imperative in ethics: “act according to such a rule that you would like to have as a universal law, and in such a way that you always treat humanity and every person as an end and never treat him only as a means” . The categorical imperative, in his opinion, should be applied in relations between nations.
The philosophy of I. Kant was influenced by the French initiation of J. J. Rousseau. He was under the influence until the “critical” period. Until 1780, Kant was brought up on Newton's mechanics. In 1755, under the influence, the work “The General Natural History and Theory of the Sky” was written. Essence: the search for great links that connect the system into the world reality. Kant put forward the theory of transcendental idealism. The essence of the theory lies in the search for the cognitive power of man. Kant sets himself the task of cognizing the ability of the mind to cognize the surrounding world. Scientists believe that Kant made a theoretical journey into the human mind. Three works were devoted to the ability of the human mind: “critique of pure reason”, “critique of practical reason”, “critique of the faculty of judgment”. In these works, he gives an analysis of the intellect, considers the sphere of human emotions and human will. Considers the example of the ability of the human mind to evaluate a work of art. All three works have an anthropological focus. The main question that runs through his theoretical judgments is what is a person? What is its essence? Answer: man is a free being and realizes himself in moral activity. The next question relates to epistemology. What can I know? what are the abilities of the human mind to know the world around? But can the human mind, the surrounding world, fully know? The powers of the mind are vast, but there are limits to knowledge. Man cannot know whether God exists or not, only faith. The surrounding reality is cognized by the method of reflection of consciousness, therefore the human consciousness cannot fully cognize the surrounding world. Kant distinguished between the phenomena of things perceived by man and things as they exist in themselves. We cognize the world not as it really is, but only as it appears to us. Thus, a new theory of “thing in itself” was proposed.
Kant poses the following question: if the thing-in-itself cannot be known, can the inner world of man be known? If so, how does the learning process proceed? Answer: reason is the ability to think on the basis of sensitive impressions, reason is the ability to reason about what can be given in experience. For example, your own soul. Kant comes to the conclusion that one cannot rely on reason in everything. What cannot be known by reason can be relied upon by faith. Experience is nothing but a stream of sense-data which fit into a priori forms; are in space and time. The a priori forms of the understanding are the concepts that we fit into our experience. For Kant, consciousness appears in the form of a hierarchical ladder.
Practical reason considers moral problems, a person is understood as a dual being: a person as a bodily being and as a phenomenon.
3. PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL
The most prominent representative of German idealist philosophy was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). The cornerstone of Hegelian idealism is the absolute idea, which Hegel considered as the subject of philosophy. From the point of view of the absolute idea, he considers all other sciences, considering his teaching to be the ultimate truth. Hegel's philosophical system consists of three main parts: logic (where the development of the absolute idea is seen as a movement from a simple thought to a concept), philosophy of nature (the development of the absolute idea in its "otherness"), philosophy of the spirit (where the development of the absolute idea goes from the world spirit to abstract). This whole system and each part of it develops according to a three-term division (triad) - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. So, in logic, the absolute idea acts as a synthesis, in the philosophy of nature it passes into the opposite, nature and becomes an antithesis, in the philosophy of the spirit it returns to its previous state, but already in the form of human consciousness, through which it cognizes itself. The same triadic development is observed in parts of the Hegelian system:
In logic: the doctrine of being (thesis), the doctrine of essence (antithesis), the doctrine of the concept (synthesis);
In the philosophy of nature: mechanics, physics and chemistry, the doctrine of organic nature;
In the philosophy of spirit: subjective spirit (anthropology, phenomenology and psychology), objective spirit (law, morality, morality), absolute spirit (aesthetics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy).
Hegel's absolute idea is not an empty abstraction; it is the process of human thinking, taken in its objective laws, torn off from man and nature and presupposed by them. In this detachment lie the roots of Hegel's idealism.
In his logic, Hegel develops dialectics most fully. The rational grain of his dialectics is the idea of development and its three main principles (law): the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa, contradiction as a source of development and negation of negation. Hegel's philosophy suffered from internal contradictions, in which "a comprehensive, once for all completed system of knowledge of nature and history contradicts the basic laws of dialectical thinking" (Lenin). He believes that the mind is a substance, a universal principle. There is a concept as a world mind. If Kant breaks the connection between object and subject, Hegel does not. Object and subject are self-directed. They are a single whole, outside of some kind of environment. The idea of unity is relative, a characteristic feature of Hegel's philosophy is the fusion of anthology and epistemology. As the world develops, the cognitive process also develops. For Hegel, the development of the surrounding world is a way and a method. He considers general development in three areas:
1) everything develops logically and abstractly;
2) the development of the otherness of the idea (nature);
3)Specific spirit
1) the transition of quantitative changes into qualitative changes;
2) negation of negation;
3) the law of unity and struggle of opposites.
The materialist Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), an outstanding classic of German philosophy, acted as a critic of Hegel's idealistic philosophy. He came out in defense of materialism, which, under the influence of Hegelian and French philosophy, was forgotten for a long time.
Like Hegel, he builds his philosophy from a single principle. Such a principle, the only and highest subject of philosophy, he declares a person, and philosophy itself - anthropology, i.e. doctrine of man. Feuerbach has an inseparable unity in them. In this unity, the soul depends on the body, and the body is primary in relation to the soul.
Feuerbach considered man only as a biological and physiological being, not seeing his social essence. This led the German philosopher to idealism in understanding society and social phenomena. He seeks to build ideas about society and relations between people, based on the properties of an individual, whose essence he considers as a natural phenomenon. Communication between people is formed on the basis of the mutual use of one person by another, which is considered by Feuerbach as a natural (natural) relationship.
He positively solved the question of the cognizability of the world. But the misunderstanding of the social essence of man determined the contemplative nature of his theory of knowledge, the role of practice was excluded from it. Feuerbach criticizes idealism and religion, which, in his opinion, are ideologically related. In The Essence of Christianity, he showed that religion has an earthly basis. God is his own essence abstracted from man and placed above him.
Kantian dialectics is the dialectics of the limits and possibilities of human knowledge: feelings, reason and human reason.
Fichte's dialectic is reduced to the study of the creative activity of the Self, to the interaction of the Self and the non-Self as opposites, on the basis of the struggle of which the development of human self-consciousness takes place. Schelling transfers the principles of dialectical development developed by Fichte to nature. His nature is a developing, developing spirit.
USED BOOKS:
V.A. Kanke "Philosophy", M. 2003;
Philosophy materials for lectures, ed. Lazareva;
L.S. Nikolaev, S.I. Samygin, L.D. Stolyarenko. "Philosophy" Exam answers for university students.
German classical philosophy.
Features of the development of Germany in the 18-19 centuries, a general characteristic of German classical philosophy.
German classical philosophy covers the period from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century; it is represented by such names as Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Germany 18-19 centuries was a feudal country ruled by a monarch - the Kaiser; predominantly agricultural country consisted of separate independent lands. The new individualistic ideas of emerging capitalism were not strong in it. Personality has developed predominantly within the traditional framework. But this did not prevent the emergence of an advanced and significant philosophy in Germany, which determined the spiritual development of the entire European civilization for many years. Apparently, the peculiar mobility of Europe, the possibility of free movement of people and ideas, played a role; lack of persecution for thinking; respect for scientific views and thinkers. Factors development of German classical philosophy are considered: the French Revolution and its ideas ("freedom", "equality", "brotherhood"); the backwardness of the socio-economic development of Germany (which created the possibility of spiritual development, since the ideology of entrepreneurship had not yet been established in the country); a situation in which the industrial revolution that took place in Holland and England, the mass production of goods associated with it, removed social tension and created confidence in the real possibility of a progressive (materially secure) development of mankind. The significance of German classical philosophy lies in the following facts:
it significantly expanded the range of traditional issues considered by philosophers;
new perspectives on traditional philosophical problems were proposed; philosophy has demonstrated a high level of scientific and theoretical research, which resulted in the construction of integral systems, including dialectical ones;
dialectics has become a productive method of philosophical analysis; German classical philosophy inherited the rationalism of the Enlighteners: an important factor in the successful development of theoretical research was the principles of rationalism, liberalism and humanism; if the Middle Ages explained being through religion and scholasticism, then holistic philosophical systems were developed here, in which worldview meanings were clarified and answers to philosophical questions were formulated with the help of ideas and categories.
Philosophical and ethical views of I.Kant. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born and lived all his life in Konigsberg (Kaliningrad). He was able to generalize the knowledge accumulated by the thinkers of modern times and identify new areas of philosophy. In 1794, the philosopher was elected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and at one time was considered a citizen of the Russian Empire. In Kant's philosophy, it is customary to distinguish two periods. The first period is connected with natural sciences . Kant, along with Laplace, was the author in the formation of hypotheses for the emergence of the solar system from a dusty nebula as a result of the Big Bang and the existence of many galaxies similar to our solar one. The philosopher expressed the idea of tidal friction, which slows down the daily rotation of the Earth, and criticized the belief in mysticism. The second period - actually philosophical, begins in 1770, when the philosopher's attention is focused on studying the possibilities of the human mind and the features of the process of cognition; Kant develops simultaneously with the theory of knowledge the theory of activity and transcendental philosophy as a unified and comprehensive theory of subjectivity. The main works of the thinker are often called the "three Critics": it is the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; Critique of Practical Reason, 1788 and Critique of Judgment, 1788. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher explains the difference between dogmatic and critical philosophy. Dogmatic philosophy builds evidence and conclusions on the basis of the human faculty of knowledge and considers reason, experience and faith as givens that should be correctly applied, but this is not enough for a productive knowledge of the world. According to Kant, every correct knowledge must anticipate transcendental knowledge; critical philosophy gives knowledge about the limits of knowledge. Critical Kant calls philosophy, which puts transcendental knowledge in the first place. As a result, according to Kant, it turns out that philosophy anticipates correct knowledge and determines the provisions of all sciences, but for this it considers the cognitive abilities of a person as its subject of study. According to Kant, a person has three main abilities of cognition: sensuality(the ability to know through sensations), which is studied by transcendental aesthetics; reason(the ability to think in general), which is studied by transcendental logic; and mind(the ability to derive general principles), which is studied by transcendental dialectics. In transcendental aesthetics (description of the first ability of cognition), Kant proves that sensation cannot be considered experience: any possible experience is carried out with the help of two forms - space (forms of organization of external experience) and time (forms of organization of internal experience). Answering the question about the origin of these forms, the philosopher rejects both the theory of innate ideas and the teaching of empiricists about the derivation of ideas from experimental data. In his explanation, he manages to overcome the one-sidedness of both concepts; according to Kant, space and time exist in consciousness before and independently of any experience, a: these are a priori forms of sensibility. Regarding judgments (Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic judgments) in which, or by which a person "fixes" his knowledge, empirical judgments are synthesized with the help of space and time, i.e. all empirical judgments are synthetic, they are not a "pure" form of knowledge, as empiricists claim. About aesthetics, Kant writes in particular that it expresses the independence of the “beautiful” from practical interest, that which pleases a person without a practical purpose. In transcendental logic (the description of the second faculty of cognition), Kant proves the a priori nature of most scientific and metaphysical categories; he shows the transcendental unity of apperception (according to Kant, all concepts, judgments and inferences can be attributed to a logical subject, regardless of their content of the statement) and “builds” the “transcendental schematism of the mind”: in cognition, according to the thinker, the mind constructs in the process of cognition of the surrounding world, certain schemes of consciousness, with the help of which a person structures reality (being). In transcendental dialectics (description of the third ability of knowledge) Kant formulated the three main questions of metaphysics (“Who am I? What is the world? Is there a God?” In another way: “What can I do? What should I do? What can I hope for?”), according to which all the ideas of reason are grouped as ideas of psychology, ideas of cosmology, and ideas of theology. The falsity of the claims of these sciences to the truth is evidenced by the emergence at the level of reason of insoluble contradictions, called antinomies by Kant. The philosopher, who comprehensively explored the human mind, believed that in the process of cognition, sensations give representations; and the mind, in the process of ordering them, discovers the “thing in itself” (the unknowable part of what is being studied) and the “phenomenon” (what is “calculable”, is known). That is, when a person tries to “penetrate” the essence of things, he cognizes them with distortions, which are due to the peculiarities of his sense organs, and as a result, he cognizes not the real world, but only “revealed to his sense organs”. At the same time, the phenomenon is not something that is in the object, but something that “always occurs in its relation to the subject and is inseparable from its (subject) representation of it (the object).” In transcendental dialectics, the philosopher proves that the categories of reason cannot be included in the theoretical sciences, since it is not possible to give a list of phenomena (things that are represented, or can be represented, by consciousness) denoted by them. The inconsistency of “judgments” and “the world”, their correlation by a person, which is not an identity, led to Kant’s conclusion that a person receives universal knowledge thanks to a priori forms that are immanent (inevitably, internally) inherent in consciousness.
Kant singled out three levels of a priori forms, corresponding to the levels of consciousness: space and time- for the sphere of sensory cognition (the qualities of space and time are located in the way of contemplating the subject, and not in objects); concepts and categories- for the realm of reason, and ideas in the realm of the mind.
A priori forms are set initially, by human nature. The process of cognition, according to Kant, is also possible as a result of going beyond the limits of experience - transcendental apperception, due to which knowledge accumulates in consciousness and the transition from a priori forms to cognition is carried out with the help of reason. A priori ideas of “pure” knowledge, not based on experience, Kant called “noumena”, these ideas do not report the existence of what is thought in them, but they are necessary and fruitful for cognition, as regulatory principles that synthesize the diversity of knowledge. Constrictions are the form of thought; the ability to understand, according to Kant, is expressed in the human ability of judgment. Analyzing the processes of cognition, Kant comes to the conclusion that the possibilities of cognition are limited by the nature of human consciousness. A person does not know other ways of thinking and perceiving the world, he has nothing to compare his own mental activity and its results with, therefore, thinking and the truth obtained in the process of cognition, according to Kant, are conditional (conditioned by the peculiarities of consciousness) and subjective. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the world is unknowable to the end, and human knowledge is conditional (perhaps because of all this), Kant declares his position very clearly: knowledge must be moral, otherwise it is not necessary for a person. Man strives for the knowledge of essences, "things-in-themselves", and this desire, according to Kant, is characteristic of the practical mind of man. If a person needs theoretical reason for knowledge, then he needs practical reason for life. The philosopher puts morality at the center of practical reason, makes values the subject of ontological analysis and creates axiology as a branch of philosophy. The central problem of practical reason, which is higher than theoretical, is the definition of the nature of the good. Any definition of this category, according to Kant, is private; the good is unknowable as a thing-in-itself; in life it is necessary to admit its unconditional existence. In this logic, Kant introduces the concept of a categorical imperative, implemented in life through two principles: “in all cases, follow duty, not arbitrariness”; "Use the other person as an end, not as a means." The thinker considers the inner feeling, the moral law, realized by a person as a free necessity that limits the will, to be the most important regulator of human behavior. The philosopher argues that morality in society should be based on the observance of a sense of duty; in several versions, he repeatedly formulates the principle of human behavior - the "categorical imperative": "treat another person the way you would like him to treat you." Only a society in which people's behavior is regulated by the voluntary fulfillment of the moral law can give freedom to a person, and only such a society can be free and legal. Between the theoretical and practical sciences, Kant places the ability of judgment, which is of an aesthetic nature. Interestingly, a number of philosophers, including Nietzsche, Jaspers and Heidegger, considered the aesthetic consciousness to be more spiritual, deep and correctly reflecting the world. Critics of Kant, however, believe that the philosopher introduces an intermediate ability in order to mitigate the main contradiction of his philosophy: at the level of theoretical knowledge, "things-in-themselves" are unknowable, while in practical knowledge they are comprehended.
Fichte
Kant's ideas were developed in the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), whose revised transcendental philosophy was called "The Science of ". Fichte considered philosophy to be a fundamental science that provides knowledge for the development of a unified method of cognition, so he did not classify the sciences, but looked for a universal method for them. The main thing in the process of cognition as the interaction of the subject and the object of cognition (when the consciousness of the subject manifests its creative activity), the philosopher considered intellectual intuition. Subject and object are interconnected and do not exist without each other; having defined consciousness as a single category of "I", acting as a concept, the thinker describes three stages of cognition: "I" affirms itself and creates itself; "I" opposes itself to "non-I" (object); "I" and "non-I", limiting each other, create a synthesis. Consciousness (“I”), according to Fichte, is understood as an objective ontological entity, not only as a subjective one, as in Kant. “Not I” is everything that is different in relation to the “I”, first of all, nature. The significance of Fichte in the history of philosophy is associated with the novelty of several of his ideas: the transition from the positions of subjective idealism to objective idealism; modern understanding of the dialectical method of cognition; the assertion of the cognizability of the objective world (“non-Self”). The philosophical system of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854, "The System of Transcendental Idealism", "The System of World Epochs", "Philosophy of Art") is called transcendental idealism, the central thesis of which is the definition of spirit as the beginning of nature, is shown in dialectical development. Schelling's transcendental idealism is connected with the doctrine of the development of the spirit through the passage of world epochs, when each world epoch corresponds to its own stage of nature and the identity of spirit and nature is assumed (this is "absolute identity"). The first epoch begins with a feeling: the object of cognition here is the external world in relation to the spirit, not separated from the spirit and having no structures; at a certain stage, the external appears as an independent whole, since the contradiction between the internal and the external makes it possible to separate them from each other. The next epoch in the development of the spirit is associated with contemplation, as the perception of the external world as a whole; in everyday life it is expressed as a moment of experience, in art as a basic human ability. The third epoch leads to the ability to perceive a part of the world and the ability to represent it as the generation of dual images, empirical in content and rational in form. Psychology, the philosophy of art and the theory of knowledge are engaged in the study of images. As a result of the development of rational content, an abstract concept appears, which is derived by thinking. Thinking differs from representation in that it operates with concepts and obeys the laws of logic. The will carries out practical activity in which the content of thinking is realized, and generates genius as a special form of knowledge, direct perception of the identity of spirit and nature (genius is like God, but does not realize its genius). The development of the spirit, according to Schelling, is dialectical: it returns to the beginning of the process, but at a qualitatively different level, while the laws of being and thinking "coincide in absolute identity." Later, Schelling became disillusioned with the rational cognizability of the world and switched to the position of mysticism, characteristic of the "German spirit". The philosophical doctrine of Schelling has clear points of contact with the Hegelian system.
Objective idealism of G. Hegel. His logic and dialectics. philosophical the system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is considered the pinnacle of classical philosophy. One of its origins is the medieval Gnostic teachings, in which, on the basis of mysticism and philosophy, there was a search for the laws of the unity of the world and knowledge about it. Hegel was born in Stuttgart; as well as other philosophers of the past, Hegel possessed all the knowledge that by that time had been accumulated in the existing sciences. The dissertation, defended by him in 1801, was devoted to the natural science problem and was called "On the Revolution of the Planets." It can be argued that Hegel purposefully gave his philosophical system the form of scientific knowledge, likening the world to thinking, functioning according to its own laws, and extending these laws to nature and society. Philosophy is understood by Hegel as a manifestation of a thinking mind that creates and changes the world; accordingly, the object of knowledge for him is not a thing, but the concept of a thing (at a certain stage of science, a “thing-in-itself” turns into a “thing-for-us”, or the concept ). Hegel's own philosophical works are numerous: The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807; "The Evolution of Consciousness", 1812-1816; "Science of Logic"; "Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences", 1817; "Philosophy of Law", "Lectures on the History of Philosophy", "Lectures on Aesthetics". Hegel is one of the few philosophers who, even during his lifetime, were recognized and revered. Maybe that's why he believed that reality is reasonable and necessary. Hegel proceeded from the fact that the world is many; Recognizing that the world is a complex system that has its own history of development, Hegel focuses his attention exclusively on the processes and movement of the mind, as if he were not interested in matter, remaining hidden behind ideal entities. According to Hegel, the task of the philosopher is to comprehend what is; what is - is the mind; logical thought is an instrument of knowledge; a concept is its basic form. So, the philosopher immediately declares his idealistic position. The stimulus for the development of the world, according to Hegel, is the aspiration of man to knowledge. Science begins with nothing, which is opposed by an indefinite being or something; the interaction of nothing and something generates a rudimentary (new) knowledge representing a certain being; the intermediate stages of the emergence of the new are formation (carried out in the mutual transition from non-existence to existence and the reverse process of transition from existence to non-existence) and removal (negation of the old with the preservation of its positive component in the new). In the philosophical system, conceived as a reflection of the real diversity and interconnectedness of everything that exists in the world, development is considered in triads (three-membered structures, or structures with three main elements), along which the Absolute Spirit moves as if on steps from the simpler to the more perfect and complex. , transforming itself (developing) into a "concept". In other words, a "concept" is a form in which the elements of the cognizable world are expressed and with which the mind operates; it personifies the beginnings of all future things, as an absolutely spiritual formation. The absolute spirit, being internally contradictory, contains the cause of development, it complicates its forms and contributes to the formation of the world. The spirit is at the basis of being, it is objective and independent of man. The cyclical development of nature, society and the spiritual life of a person, with the help of concepts connected by three, is formed in a certain triadic system. Those. there are always three cycles: positing (thesis), negation of the initial positing (antithesis) and one more thesis (synthesis; negation of negation, or double negation). This scheme, the elements of which, as shown above, contain the formation and "negation, as a rise" of the previous element, actually reflects Hegel's understanding of dialectics. Dialectics is considered the main achievement of his philosophy. In the Science of Logic, which contains an analysis of the laws and categories of dialectics, Hegel explores the "concept", the "idea-in-itself-and-for-itself", and shows that a concept can be defined through its opposite (for example, "being" and “nothing”), that at the level of everyday life (according to Hegel, the “level of representation”) a person does not notice the contradiction, which is the law of thinking. Developing the doctrine of Heraclitus about the relativity of opposites, the philosopher formulates a proof of the process of mutual transition of opposites; according to Hegel, all categories are subject to the first law of dialectics, the law of unity and struggle of opposites. The categories "quantity" and "quality" are considered in the "Philosophy of Nature" as related to matter, as to the otherness of the idea: these categories in the norm (the state of "measure", according to Hegel) constitute harmony, although they contradict each other; as quantitative changes accumulate, upon reaching a certain level, an increasingly intensive growth of changes becomes associated with a violation of the measure, when the accumulated quantitative changes through a jump lead to the emergence of a new quality. Here Hegel formulates the second law of dialectics - the transition of quantitative changes to qualitative ones and vice versa. In the Philosophy of the Spirit, Hegel defines the Spirit not just as a pure substance, as in rationalism, but the unity of the ideal and the material, the pinnacle of the evolution of nature, taking into account the fact that the laws of the Spirit are more complex than the laws of nature and they are governed by the laws of history. The laws of the Spirit are connected with the logical triad, where the thesis and antithesis, passing into each other many times, acquire the features of each other and their synthesis arises. Based on the principle of the triad, the philosopher explains the third law of dialectics - the law of negation of negation. According to Hegel, there are three forms of development: contradiction, movement, and qualitative change; development is understood as an irreversible qualitative change, acting at the level of the Spirit as a conscious process. Further, the philosopher introduces the doctrine of world history, considering the history of mankind as a coincidence of the deeds of people with the logic of the development of the Absolute idea; this coincidence occurs in the life of a historical people, embodying the highest civilizational values (antiquity and the Greek people); in the historical people there appear historical personalities who are not aware of their significance, but guess in their actions the direction of development of the Absolute idea. The criterion of progress in history is the development of freedom. Hegel's philosophical system, in which philosophy appears as a developing system of universal categories and concepts, is a kind of philosophical picture of the world.. The process of development of beings is progressive, as it serves the purposes of achieving a different point of view of the Spirit, which is in a different quality - the goals of achieving human consciousness. Progressive development as a process is shown (demonstrated), according to Hegel, by concepts united as has already been said, in triads . For example, categories (Spirit) - nature - man; subjective Spirit (Spirit in itself) - objective Spirit (right) - absolute Spirit (truth); art - religion - philosophy. In philosophy, according to Hegel, the idea cognizes itself, connecting the developing Absolute idea with its spiritual source, here the Absolute Spirit returns to itself on a new level. Thus, the Hegelian dialectic proceeds from the presence in each existing, besides the identity of itself, something else, or its negation. This element gives rise to a contradiction, which, growing (accumulating quantity), leads to the process of resolving contradictions (entry through the violation of the “measure” and the “leap” into a new quality); then, at a new level, the emergence and resolution of contradictions again takes place - therefore they say: "Hegel's dialectic requires eternal development." Marxist philosophy considers Hegelian philosophy contradictory: calling this philosophical system metaphysical (because the Absolute Spirit "returns to itself"), Marxists oppose it to the dialectical nature of the method, ignoring the fact that the return here takes place on a new level. Hegel's influence on subsequent philosophy was enormous; The dual reading of Hegel determined the processes that took place in Europe: all thinkers were divided into the Young Hegelians, who adopted the dialectical method and wished to reform the social sphere of life, and the Old Hegelians, who justified the existing social reality. Anthropological materialism of L. Feuerbach and his criticism of religion. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), unlike Kant and Hegel, did not attempt to build a philosophical system. He, like most philosophers, left works that shed light on some philosophical questions. Feuerbach considered himself a materialist and an atheist, and saw criticism of idealism as his main task. Calling Hegel's philosophy rational mysticism, unfortunately, he did not notice the significance of the important achievement of his predecessor - his dialectical method. He perceived idealism as a theoretical justification for religion; in a well-known work (“The Essence of Christianity”), devoted to the criticism of religion, the philosopher claims that it was not God who created people, but people created God in their own image and likeness. Feuerbach, being the founder of anthropological materialism, put forward the principle that the main object of a person's vital interest is always another person. In order for the Other to exist as an object, it is necessary to show love. Where there is no love, there is no truth. Therefore, it is no coincidence that, according to Feuerbach's views, the only source and form of knowledge are human sensations, which he considers as a manifestation of his natural essence. The driving force of the human will is the pursuit of happiness. The "I" cannot be happy without the "You", this "causes the consciousness of the moral spirit." All conceivable transformations, according to Feuerbach, a person must begin with himself. The philosopher believed that a person is not so much a social as a biological (generic) being. Feuerbach, a materialist in the understanding of nature, in relation to society, acts as an idealist: in his opinion, changes in the history of the development of society are associated with processes taking place in religious consciousness: Christianity has changed morality and attitude towards man; the moral degeneration of man determined the subsequent social development. Formation of philosophical views of K. Marx. The thirties of the nineteenth century - the time of formation, and in a number of countries the heyday of capitalism. The thinker who described the process of the emergence of new relations in the economy and tried to predict the future of these relations for the human community was Karl Marx. With the help of his senior comrade and friend Friedrich Engels, he managed to publish his works, which had a significant impact on many generations of people. After the revolution of 1917, the teachings of Marx in Russia became the state ideology and the basis of the totalitarian regime that lasted seventy-three years. Marx's teaching was finalized by G.V. Plekhanov, L. Trotsky, N. Bukharin and V. Lenin for the period of imperialism and its application in Russia, where conditions differed from the situation described by German thinkers. In parallel, other, “national” (Yugoslavian, Chinese) or regional (Latin American) variants of Marxism arose and still exist. Marxism has followers in the philosophical currents of the twentieth century and modern times; there are teachings constructed as a criticism of Marxism; on the other hand, a number of thinkers do not consider it possible to rank Marx among the philosophers, considering him a brilliant economist. But, apparently, he was not just an economist, if his teaching captured the minds of millions of people all over the planet and still continues to play an important role in public life. The USSR was a stronghold of the communist idea, firmly planting the ideology of Marxism within the country and spreading it around the world (through the activities of the Comintern, teaching foreign students in the USSR, providing material assistance to developing countries in exchange for ideological concessions, etc.) As a result of World War II, a new division of the world on spheres of influence meant for a significant part of Eastern Europe, which was liberated from fascism by the Soviet army, automatic and uncontested accession to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Marx's main work, Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867, contains a detailed, in many ways ingenious analysis of capitalist production. The works written together with Engels (The Role of Labor in the Transformation of Apes into Man, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, etc.) also dealt with philosophical questions. In modern literature, the opinion is expressed that there is a significant discrepancy between the real content of the philosophy of Marxism and the self-assessment of Marxists. It must be admitted that Marxism is not only the "scientific ideology of the working class"; it has parts like scientific communism; dialectical materialist philosophy; proletarian political economy. Marx's dialectic was built on the basis of Hegel's dialectic. Marx criticized L. Feuerbach, who did not notice the rational grain in Hegel's philosophy, and turned Hegel's idealistic dialectics into materialistic. Dialectics becomes in Marxism the science of the universal laws of the development of nature, society and thought; laws of development of social production. Later, it also includes the laws of the socialist revolution, the building of socialism and communism, and becomes part of the "science of the liberation struggle of the proletariat" and of the universal connections of historical processes. Obviously mistaken was the conviction of the followers of Marx that this doctrine could explain everything and be the foundation in all areas. At one time, Engels warned of the danger of vulgarizing Marx's teachings, however, this turned out to be historically inevitable. The historical prerequisites for the emergence of Marxism, according to V.I. Lenin, were the growth of the working class, the teachings of the utopian socialists and Hegel's dialectic. Marx showed that the basis of social development and social relations is material production. Mankind in its development goes through several stages, characterized by a certain state of production and social relations corresponding to this production. The followers of Marx are talking about the primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, communist formations (can be compared with the "phases" of O. Comte). Formations differ in the level of development of productive forces and dominant class relations (the relations of two opposing classes are emphasized at each stage of the development of society: slaves and slave owners, peasants and landowners, hired workers and entrepreneurs). The very "advancement" of mankind along the socio-economic levels is of a progressive and progressive nature. This, according to Marx, is the way of development of each community; Lenin introduced a clarification that “jumping” over “formations” is possible if this is historically determined. In particular, in this way Lenin circumvented Marx's reasoning that a socialist revolution is possible at a high level of development of capitalist production, with a significant increase in the political self-consciousness of workers and their numbers, and the socialization of capital and production. Moreover, according to Marx, socialism (the first phase of capitalism) is characterized by the nationalization of monopolized capital and the solution of social problems of society. At this stage, the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work” is implemented. Based on these provisions, today the authors of some articles on the recent history of Russia write that they tried to build socialism in the USSR until the thirties, then development took place not according to the Marxist, but to the totalitarian scenario. In this regard, the countries of developed Europe and America were closer to Marxism, which carried out social programs, fought poverty, without changing the principles of capitalism. The formational view of the development of history is subjected to serious criticism in several respects: as an inhumane approach, schematic, not meeting the “epistemologically significant criterion of homogeneity”, for being eschatological, for straightening and smoothing history, for the narrowness of the content of the construction itself (allowing structural breaks in the meanings of socio-historical processes, taking into account each time only pairs of antagonistic classes). At the same time, it is impossible to deny the significance of Marxism in the history of the development of social life and its role as a methodology of social cognition. Modern researchers of Marxism write about the "religious-dogmatic" nature of this doctrine, aggressiveness (the proletariat "has nothing to lose but its chains", let the "tyrants of the world", "the ruling classes" "shudder" or "tremble") and claims to to become a kind of "epiphany". So, in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848), it was written: "a ghost roams Europe, the ghost of communism." Interestingly, Marxism itself contains grounds for its own criticism, arguing, for example, that all social theories are an expression of ideology, or that ideology is consciousness deformed by class interests, and at the same time declaring itself to be the ideology of the proletariat, or asserting the thesis about the scientific nature of Marxism . That is, one of the features of the ideology of Marxism is the inconsistency of the provisions: the proclamation of a complete break with the past: “the teachings that preceded Marxism explained the world, and the task is to change it”; and the statement that "you can become a communist only when you enrich your memory with the knowledge that humanity has accumulated." Many supporters of Marxism are attracted to the ideas of equality and brotherhood, despite the fact that they have been discredited by concentration camps and other forms of personal violence. As a rule, the spread of ideology takes place in economically and socially disadvantaged countries with a low standard of living, where the poor make up to 80% of the population. The utopianism of this doctrine also played its role in the spread of Marxism, since a person always strives for a better future, and the “idea of a bright future” remains relevant until the problems of a person in society are solved.
1. General characteristics
2. Philosophy of Kant
3. Fichte's philosophy
4. Schelling's philosophy
5. Philosophy of Hegel
6. Feuerbach's philosophy
1. General characteristics
German classical philosophy is a significant stage in the development of philosophical thought and culture of mankind. It is represented by the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775–1854), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–1872).
Each of these philosophers created his own philosophical system, characterized by a wealth of ideas and concepts. At the same time, German classical philosophy is a single spiritual formation, which is characterized by the following common features:
1. A peculiar understanding of the role of philosophy in the history of mankind, in the development of world culture. Classical German philosophers believed that philosophy was called upon to be the critical conscience of culture, the “confronting consciousness”, “grinning at reality”, the “soul” of culture.
2. Not only human history was investigated, but also human essence. Kant sees man as a moral being. Fichte emphasizes the activity, effectiveness of consciousness and self-consciousness of a person, considers the structure of human life according to the requirements of reason. Schelling sets the task of showing the relationship between the objective and the subjective. Hegel expands the boundaries of the activity of self-consciousness and individual consciousness: the self-consciousness of the individual in him correlates not only with external objects, but also with other self-consciousness, from which various social forms arise. He deeply explores various forms of social consciousness. Feuerbach creates a new form of materialism - anthropological materialism, at the center of which is a really existing person who is a subject for himself and an object for another person. For Feuerbach, the only real things are nature and man as part of nature.
3. All representatives of classical German philosophy treated philosophy as a special system of philosophical disciplines, categories, ideas.
I. Kant, for example, singles out as philosophical disciplines, first of all, epistemology and ethics.
Schelling - natural philosophy, ontology.
Fichte, considering philosophy a "scientific study", saw in it such sections as ontological, epistemological, socio-political.
Hegel created a broad system of philosophical knowledge, which included the philosophy of nature, logic, the philosophy of history, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of morality, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of the state, the philosophy of the development of individual consciousness, etc.
Feuerbach considered ontological, epistemological and ethical problems, as well as philosophical problems of history and religion.
4. Classical German philosophy develops a holistic concept of dialectics.
Kantian dialectics is the dialectics of the limits and possibilities of human knowledge: feelings, reason and human reason.
Fichte's dialectic is reduced to the study of the creative activity of the Self, to the interaction of the Self and the non-Self as opposites, on the basis of the struggle of which the development of human self-consciousness takes place.
Schelling transfers the principles of dialectical development developed by Fichte to nature. His nature is a developing, developing spirit.
The great dialectician is Hegel, who presented a detailed, comprehensive theory of idealistic dialectics. For the first time he presented the entire natural, historical and spiritual world as a process, i.e. studied it in continuous movement, change, transformation and development, contradictions, quantitative-qualitative and qualitative-quantitative changes, interruptions in gradualness, the struggle of the new with the old, directed movement. In logic, in the philosophy of nature, in the history of philosophy, in aesthetics, and so on. - in each of these areas, Hegel sought to find a thread of development.
All classical German philosophy breathes dialectics.
Special mention must be made of Feuerbach. Until recently, in Soviet philosophy, the assessment given by F. Engels of Feuerbach's attitude to Hegel's dialectic was interpreted as Feuerbach's rejection of any dialectics in general. However, this question should be divided into two parts: the first is Feuerbach's attitude not only to dialectics, but in general to Hegel's philosophy; the second is that Feuerbach really, in criticizing the Hegelian system of objective idealism, “thrown out the baby with the water”, i.e. did not understand Hegel's dialectic, its cognitive significance and historical role.
However, Feuerbach himself does not avoid dialectics in his philosophical studies. He considers the connections of phenomena, their interactions and changes, the unity of opposites in the development of phenomena (spirit and body, human consciousness and material nature). He made an attempt to find the relationship between the individual and the social. Another thing is that anthropological materialism did not let him out of his "embraces", although the dialectical approach when considering phenomena was not completely alien to him.
5. Classical German philosophy emphasized the role of philosophy in developing the problems of humanism and made attempts to comprehend human life. This comprehension took place in different forms and in different ways, but the problem was posed by all representatives of this trend of philosophical thought.
Socially significant should include:
Kant's study of the entire life activity of a person as a subject of moral consciousness, his civil freedom, the ideal state of society and real society with incessant antagonism between people, etc.;
Fichte's ideas about the primacy of the people over the state, consideration of the role of moral consciousness in human life, the social world as a world of private property, which is protected by the state; Hegelian doctrine of civil society, the rule of law, private property;
Schelling's reliance on reason as a means of realizing a moral goal;
Feuerbach's desire to create a religion of love and humanistic ethics. Such is the peculiar unity of the humanistic aspirations of the representatives of classical German philosophy.
It can be definitely said that the representatives of classical German philosophy followed the enlighteners of the 18th century. and above all by the French enlighteners, proclaiming man the master of nature and spirit, asserting the power of the mind, turning to the idea of the laws of the historical process.
At the same time, they were also spokesmen for the socio-economic, political and spiritual atmosphere that surrounded them directly, acted as their own being: the feudal fragmentation of Germany, the lack of national unity, the orientation of the developing bourgeoisie towards various compromises, as it experienced after the Great French Revolution fear of any revolutionary movement; desire to have a strong monarchical power and military power.
It is this compromise that finds its philosophical justification in the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Feuerbach. And although the latter is a representative of a different worldview orientation - materialistic, but he also considers the solution of social problems on the path of reforms, promising civil peace and tranquility in society. Classical German philosophy is one of the most important expressions of the spiritual culture of the 19th century.
