Ticket Humanism and threats of dehumanization in modern culture. "One-Dimensional Man", "Man-Mass", "Death of Man
The problem of the dehumanization of culture, which has been worrying European intellectuals for a long time, has not lost its sharpness even today. And we need to think about it, write about it, shout about it... Only by awakening society from its destructive sleep, can we still hope to revive the humanistic potential of each of us.
I keep asking myself questions: When did this start? After World War I? Or earlier, when the first thoughts about natural selection about the importance of capital, about the mass man, about the dictatorship of the libido, about universal relativity?
And yes, I understood ... The great European minds of the end of the century before last, who decided to average everyone, broke with metaphysics, closed their lives on physics - that's who prepared the terrible 20th century, distorting the concept of man, trampling the foundations of Renaissance humanism. It was from their submission that in the century of cinema, the atom and flight into space, the idea of the divine nature of the individual, his originality and complexity was finally devalued.
The human being was artificially compressed during large-scale social experiments. The complete and scientifically proven debunking of homo universalis led to the emergence of a one-dimensional person - a narrow professional, a thoughtless performer, a cog in the system. The mechanistic paradigm of the last century made the dialogue of the particular with the eternal and its enduring values practically impossible. Since a person was thought of only as material for the realization of various kinds of utopias, then there could be no question of any interest of the elites in the development of the spiritual life of society. Unfortunately, we are successfully using this heritage of the utopian age-radical even today. I regret to report that the 20th century continues, that its mass approaches to individual by no means exhausted. Global capitalism, which has literally enslaved the population of third world countries, is successfully continuing the dehumanization of culture, distorting the idea of a free and creative person, and depriving each of us of a chance for a better life.
The dehumanization of culture began not with Stalin's camps, not with Auschwitz and Dachau, but with the mass production of paintings and films. Yes, it is precisely the commercialization of art (its focus on challenge and sensation, on the puzzle and indulgence of all kinds of vulgarity) that has led to the fact that culture has lost an idea of the spiritual essence of man, of the deep aspirations and demands of einer sch;nen Seele. Stuffed with abstract theories, the naturalism (aesthetic savagery!) of art, which continues to this day, has led to the fact that people have forgotten how to understand real masterpieces created by masters of previous eras. Now they do not understand Titian and Rembrandt, not because the meaning of their artistic message is outdated, but because of the atrophy of the soul, the loss of true artistic taste, the discrete perception of the eternal fullness of the world.
Despite all the savagery into which we have fallen so imperceptibly and so deeply, I do not cease to believe in the future revival of the humanistic principles of the world. For this, perhaps, some colossal event or some powerful impulse is needed that would change the state of affairs. However, you need to start with yourself!
Each of us needs to become more responsible and humane. Only a personal decision to fight the dehumanization of culture can change the current situation. It is absolutely clear that without stopping the global dehumanization of culture, we will not be able to continue to develop, we will not be able to remain human in the full sense. Now is not the time for naive daydreaming and defensive snobbery. It's time to unite the efforts of people good will from all over the world and start a resolute fight against the virus of dehumanization.
UDC 1:37.01
Levitskaya Irina Alexandrovna
Ivanovo State University of Chemical Technology
THE PROBLEM OF DEHUMANIZATION OF EDUCATION IN MODERN CULTURE
The article discusses the ancient Greek ideal of paideia and substantiates its relevance in modern philosophical and pedagogical thought.
Key words: paideia ideal, humanization, education, competence-based approach.
In difficult, critical periods in the life of society, the need for theoretical analysis changes in spiritual culture, the most important component of which is the education system.
In modern society and education, the features of their dehumanization are largely manifested. There is a loss of spiritual and moral values, rejection of a worldview based on justice, lack of attention and respect for a person, depreciation of a person's life. In education, the requirements for the level of vocational and technical knowledge came to the fore, while forgetting its humanistic foundations. Ignoring questions personal development, the formation of human citizenship has a negative impact on the level of professional qualities of young professionals.
The educational function is gradually leaving the modern school, priority is given to education in its most traditional form as the transfer of ready-made knowledge, which contradicts the goal of education set during the period of perestroika. “An educated person is not so much a person who knows, but one who is prepared for life, versed in the complex problems of modern culture, able to comprehend his place in the world,” this is how the essence of the ongoing educational reforms was commented in 1992. According to A.Ya. Kuznetsova, today in education there are such negative phenomena as the disintegration of knowledge, the fragmentation of subject education, the violation of the integrity and sustainability of human development. The existing system of education is increasingly turning knowledge into a commodity on the market of ideas, into a tool for manipulating people.
The competence-based approach that is being developed today removes some of the above problems, namely:
1) gives answers to the requests of the production sector (T.M. Kovaleva);
2) manifests itself as an update of the content of education in response to the changing socio-economic reality (ID Frumin);
3) and as a generalized condition for a person's ability to act effectively outside of educational plots and learning situations(V.A. Bolotov);
4) is characterized by the possibility of transferring the ability to conditions other than those in which this
competence initially arose (V.V. Ba-shev);
5) competence is defined as an attribute of preparation for future professional activity (P.G. Shchedrovitsky);
6) human competence has a vector of acmeological development (N.V. Kuzmina);
7) competence is based on knowledge as an intellectually and personally conditioned social and professional life activity. The competence-based approach is characterized by the strengthening of both the actual pragmatic and humanistic orientation of the educational process and does not contradict the formation common culture personality in the education system (I.A. Zimnyaya).
Nevertheless, the central problem of the humanization of education, the value filling of the cognitive educational reservoir remains unresolved. All this illustrates the extent of the crisis that has engulfed education and proves the need to revise its philosophical foundations, primarily philosophical and anthropological ones. To overcome the crisis, the education system must be focused on the person as the highest value of being. The humanization of education in modern Russian society is becoming an urgent need and should be considered as the principle of education and as a way and means of getting out of a critical state.
The problem of humanization of education is at the center of modern humanistic philosophy of education and humanistic pedagogy, as a domestic one (E.N. Gusinsky, Yu.I. Turchaninova, A.P. Ogurtsov, V.V. Platonov, V.A. Sukhomlinsky, Sh A. Amonashvili, L. I. Novikova, T. N. Malkovskaya, A. V. Mudrik and others), and foreign (F. Smith, C. Rogers, D. Dewey, J. Piaget and others. ).
The main task of humanistic pedagogy is to awaken in a person a craving for self-knowledge and critical research, for independence. Its goal is to educate a humane person, open to the whole world, to all non-totalitarian and non-human-hating worldviews, ideologies and political doctrines capable of making a meaningful, free and responsible choice in any area of culture and social life. As V.A. Sukhomlinsky, “in the person we educate, morals must be combined
natural purity, spiritual wealth, physical perfection.
Humanistic pedagogy is designed to overcome the alienation of a person from himself, from his abilities and needs. Within its framework, ethical principles are tested by each person directly in the context of a particular situation, his unique life experience. Humanism stands for moral freedom each individual person to determine the meaning and way of his life on the basis of not so much group, ideological or religious, but above all, universal values. Education should help each person to discover and comprehend these values.
The goal laid down in the humanistic concept of education coincides with the Greek ideal of pay-dei, which also assumed the formation of a cultural, developed personality, the upbringing of an intellectual and healthy person, well developed physically, combining the beauty of the body and moral virtues. The ancient Greek pay-deia was a kind of program for cultivating the truly human in a person. It was focused not on the formation of some individual abilities, skills and "talents", but on the achievement of the ideal of spiritual and physical perfection - kalokagatiya. Pai-deya forms, forms a person as such. Mastering "objects of general interest", a person transcends his "I" and, being distracted from the subjective and random, assimilating a broader and more objective view of things, approaches the embodiment of the ideal, with which he will need to measure his thoughts and thoughts throughout his life. deeds.
The goal of education was considered to be "the acquisition of wisdom as an art of living", which, of course, excluded professional training in any art or craft. Aristotle, for example, clearly distinguishes between education as such and special knowledge of a particular subject: “a fully educated person is able to judge any things, while a “knowing” one is knowledgeable only in a certain area” . From this point of view, being "educated" is better than simply "knowledgeable", and education that "contains the goal in itself" is preferable to artisanal "training" that is "necessary for application in business life and has other goals in mind" . Aristotle considered the main goal of education to be the harmonious development of the personality, the development of the higher aspects of the soul - rational, moral and strong-willed.
The idea of the priority of education over training, expressed by the ancient Greek philosophers, corresponds deep roots national pedagogical culture. For Russian Pedagogy
always building inner man", his moral core was more important than a certain amount of knowledge. In the domestic pedagogy of the Soviet period, the principle of the unity of upbringing and education was defended by such famous teachers as K.D. Ushinsky, V.P. Vakhterov, S.I. Gessen, A.S. Makarenko. For example, A.S. Makarenko was critical of traditional pedagogy, in which questions of didactics were always in the foreground, and educational problems were relegated to the background. The teacher considered this a fundamental mistake, since upbringing is a broad phenomenon that includes both training and education.
Special emphasis A.S. Makarenko focuses on the social nature of education, believing that “not only a child, not only a schoolboy, but every citizen at every stage is subject to education. It is subject to education either in specially organized forms, or in the forms of broad public influence. Each of our business, each company, each process in our country is always accompanied not only by special tasks, but also by the tasks of education. A similar principle is characteristic of the Greek ideal of paideia. Paideia is a matter of a lifetime (and not only a period of "school" education), and moreover, the main thing: "this is a lifelong struggle for the knowledge of the highest Good, against the ignorance that owns the soul, blocking its path to happiness" .
Focusing on a standardized model - the comprehensive and harmonious development of the personality, - A.S. Makarenko did not let the individual out of sight as a representative of the human community with his natural inclinations (temperament, character, abilities, intellect). According to Makarenko, a person “must be enlightened, qualified, disciplined, politically developed ... It is necessary to instill in him a sense of duty and a sense of honor, the ability to obey a comrade, the ability to be polite, stern, kind and merciless - depending on the conditions of life and struggle .
Ideas close in content to the ideal of the ancient Greek paideia were also expressed by another great Russian teacher - V.P. Watchmen. In his pedagogical concept, which was called "Evolutionary Pedagogy", the basis is the idea of development, that is, the interpretation of education and upbringing as a progressive movement, combined with the conviction that education in all its forms and forms is one of critical factors social progress. And the main value for the teacher, according to V.P. Vakhterov, has the development of the personality of the pupil. “A psychologist studies a child so that on the simplest manifestations of the child’s psyche it is easier to understand the psyche
at all; anthropologist - to find indications and hints on the development of all mankind in the development of the child; archaeologist - in order to find analogies in the products and drawings of the child with archaeological finds; philologist - in order to catch the laws of language development in the development of children's speech, etc. And the teacher, using his observations, can add to them the results of the work of psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, etc. in order to comply with the laws of child development his upbringing, the change of methods and materials for his education as his pupil grows.
In the post-Soviet period in social environment pragmatic ideas become priority, which leads to the dehumanization of culture and education. The information revolution, widespread computerization are progress in teaching technology, but they are able to absorb the human personality, so today it is not accidental that we come to the problem of understanding antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal. The task of the modern philosophy of education, in our opinion, is to develop a humanistic ideal of education that preserves the basic principles of the Greek pay-deia, primarily the principle of the unity of education and upbringing.
Is it possible to save traditional values education in a world that has changed dramatically since antiquity? The answer to this question depends on one or another solution of the philosophical-ontological problem of the general nature of man. If the general nature of man and universal human needs really exist, then the values corresponding to them can be preserved over long periods of cultural history. If human nature is changeable and has a specific historical character, then the values in each era are specific and, accordingly, the educational strategies chosen by a particular society are specific. However, the analysis of this problem is beyond the scope of this article.
Bibliographic list
1. Aristotle. Sobr. op. - M.: Thought, 1976. -T. 1. - 552 p.
2. Aristotle, Plato. Paideia: Rise to Valor. - M.: URAO, 2003. - 480 p.
3. Bashev V.V., Frumin I.D. Problem-reflexive approach in social science: uch.-method. allowance. - M.: MIROS, 2002. - 176 p.
4. Bolotov V.A., Serikov V.V. Competency model: from idea to educational program// Pedagogy. - 2003. - No. 10. - S. 8-14.
5. Vakhterov V.P. moral education and elementary school. - M.: Red. zhur. "Russian Thought", 1901. - 241 p.
6. Zimnyaya I.A. Competence approach. What is its place in the system modern approaches to educational issues? (Theoretical and methodological approach) // Higher education Today. -2006. - No. 8. - S. 21-26.
7. Yeager V. Paideia. Education of the ancient Greek: in 3 vols. T. 1. / trans. with him. M.N. Botvinnik. -M.: Greco-Latin cabinet Yu.A. Shachilina, 1997. - 336 p.
8. Kalinina N.A. Humanization of education: philosophical aspect// Bulletin of the South Russian state university economy and service. Humanities and social sciences. - 2011. - № 4. - S. 53-61.
9. Kovaleva T.M. School skills and key competencies - what is common and what is the difference // Pedagogy of development: key competencies and their formation: materials of the 9th scientific and practical conference. - Krasnoyarsk, 2003. -S. 63.
10. Kuznetsova A.Ya. Humanistic concept of the philosophy of education // Philosophy of Education. - 2006. - No. 1. - S. 43-50.
11. Kuzmina N.V. Acmeological theory of improving the quality of training of education specialists. - M.: Research Center for Quality Problems in Training Specialists, 2001. - 144 p.
12. Makarenko A. S. Pedagogical poem. - M.: Azbuka-klassika, 2009. - 416 p.
13. Mekhova A.A., Budykina E.P. Humanistic philosophy of educational reforms: the adequacy of the goals and results of their implementation // Source. - 1996. - No. 3. - S. 6-14.
14. Plato. Sobr. cit.: in 4 volumes. T. 1. - St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University, 2010. - 632 p.
15. Sukhomlinsky V.A. About education. - M.: Politizdat, 1988. - 269 p.
16. Frumin I.D. Competence-based approach as a natural stage of updating the content of education // Pedagogy of development: key competencies and their formation: materials of the 9th scientific and practical conference. - Krasnoyarsk, 2003. - S. 36-55.
15. Shchedrovitsky G.P. On the method of studying thinking. - M.: Inst. Development them. G.P. Shchedrovitsky, 2006. - 600 p.
What is dehumanization
The idea that a person is at the center of the universe, his life is the highest value, and he himself has the right to independently determine the form and content of his own life, began to take shape at the end of the Middle Ages and was finally established in the Enlightenment, when the accelerated economic, political and cultural processes rapidly formed the face of what would later be called Modern. The key is the concept of progress, indicating the progressive development of society, which abandons old prejudices and, on rational grounds, changes itself, adapting to the Man with a capital letter, freeing him from the burden of the past, improving legislation, improving the material conditions of his life.
The illusions of a great era of progress began to crumble already in the 19th century: for example, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, figures so important to the findesiècle, had no particular illusions about human nature, and realist writers who castigated social vices not always looked to the future with optimism. Culturally big role played by Darwinism, positivism and psychoanalysis that arose in the second half of the 19th century - they destroyed humanistic illusions and represented man no longer as the crown of creation, intelligent and life-changing in better side, but a blind-sighted animal, which is led by base instincts, gross desires and the struggle for survival. The massacre of the First World War with its millions of dead put an end to this story: what kind of humanism can we talk about when weapons of mass destruction are used?
But the catastrophes of the middle of the century, the Holocaust and the Gulag, showed that this is not the limit and dehumanization can reach unprecedented proportions, in comparison with which the savagery and cruelty of archaic societies will seem like a childish prank. The reflection on how humanity could drive itself into such a corner continues to this day, and it is unlikely that it will ever be possible to put a bullet in it: the scale of the crimes committed by people against people is too great. Each generation will have to try to comprehend them again, but already in the 20th century, the most important works were created that allow us to understand the phenomenon of dehumanization, its origins, essence and gloomy legacy.
- Reception
- Context
Reception
« Gutta-percha boy"is built on contrast: the author's intonation is calm, somewhere even everyday, the descriptions are detailed, with many details, they are pleasant to read, but at the same time we are talking about a terrible tragedy.
Key
On the one hand, this text fully fits into the tradition of humanistic literature XIX century with its attention to the oppressed and the dispossessed; on the other hand, it sounds extremely modern, there is almost no obsessive sentimentality in it, which at that time was almost the main code of socio-critical fiction (it is enough to recall at least Dostoevsky and Dickens), but there is a story that any child can easily try on . It is not surprising that Grigorovich's story became a classic of children's literature (although some of its editions are usually published in a greatly abridged form) and to this day remains perhaps the best illustration of how a person is reduced to the state of an animal, thing, instrument.
Context
Grigorovich stood at the origins of noble populism in Russian literature, his most famous works were written in the forties of the XIX century, they deal with the hard life of the peasants. In the sixties he, along with other writers noble origin quarreled with radical raznochintsy (all of them were members of the Sovremennik magazine) and fell silent for a long time: it would take almost twenty years before he again took up the pen and wrote several works, including The Gutta-Percha Boy.
Dmitry Grigorovich. Gutta Percha Boy (1883)
The boy Petya, an orphan, is taken in by the acrobat Becker, a cruel man who speaks bad Russian and treats the child like an animal. Petya has nowhere to go: he has no relatives, and he has to learn difficult and dangerous tricks, endure beatings and humiliation, live in filth and starving. There is almost no one to stand up for him, the clown Edwards sometimes tries to exhort the acrobat Becker, but he himself has long turned into a kind of machine gun, his only task is to make the child an instrument, in front of which the gutta-percha boy will die at the end of the book. The inhumanity of the environment, in no way suitable for any kind of tolerable childhood, is described as follows: “Opening the door, Edwards entered a tiny low room located under the first gallery for spectators; it was unbearable in her from stuffiness and heat; the stable air, heated by the gas, was joined by the smell of tobacco smoke, lipstick and beer; on one side was a mirror in a wooden frame sprinkled with powder; nearby, on the wall, pasted over with wallpaper, bursting through all the cracks, hung a tights that looked like torn human skin.
The author does not give readers the opportunity to get acquainted with inner world the main character - we understand that he is suffering, but we do not know what his thoughts and feelings really are. In addition to the objectified author's description, we see Petya first through the eyes of a clown who sympathizes with him, but can do little to help (and he himself, in general, is in a very unenviable position), and then through the eyes of children from a noble family who good behavior allowed to attend a circus performance. The gutta-percha boy, whose performance the children were waiting for, fails to cope with a difficult number, falls to the floor of the circus and dies. Children are horrified, but adults, their parents, do not show the slightest sympathy: for them, as well as for Becker, Petya is just an attraction, entertainment, and the fact that he did not cope with his functions causes indignation in Count Listomirov: “What -there the scoundrel broke loose ... (the count, apparently, was agitated, because, according to the principle, he never used harsh, vulgar expressions), - some scoundrel broke loose and fell ... what a sight for children !! Hm!! our children especially are so nervous; Vera is so impressionable... She won’t sleep all night now...”
See
An emblematic example of dehumanization can be found in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The hobbit Smeagol becomes the owner of the Ring of Omnipotence, and it subordinates him to his will. The hobbit is expelled from his native village, he turns into a miserable, but at the same time evil and dangerous creature, his personality splits, he loses the skills of normal human speech, he refers to himself in the plural, and so on. Although the author writes about imaginary archaic times and traditional society, we understand that in this case we are talking about the dangers that threaten a person of the 20th century - about unlimited power and technology, the most important tools for dehumanization.
William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies (1954) is considered one of the most important texts of the 20th century, and this is not surprising: the problem of dehumanization, the loss of the human, was posed in it with radical sharpness. “Lord of the Flies” is a kind of “Anti-Robinson”: if in Defoe’s novel the hero who has fallen on a desert island brings with him civilization and christian religion, inhabits the wilderness, humanizes the savage, then in Golding's book, during the war, evacuated children end up on the same island, in a short time getting rid of the shackles of civilization and starting to kill each other. The romance is full biblical symbolism, he reminds us that Cain lives in each of us, who can wake up at any moment, but such a work could only appear after the horrors of World War II.
Hotel Rwanda (2004), which received three Oscar and Golden Globe nominations each, is a film about the 1993 Rwandan genocide. Main character, who manages an expensive hotel, and his wife belong to different ethnic groups who are about to start cutting each other. The first murders have already taken place, but the hero, by bribing influential people, is trying to avert trouble from himself and his family. Meanwhile, with every minute of the film, the price human life outside the walls of the hotel is getting smaller and smaller.
- Reception
- Context
Reception
The metaphor and grotesqueness of The Little Demon immediately catches the eye and creates a comical, sometimes frightening effect, but at the same time there is no feeling that you are reading an allegorical work like Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a City: Sologub is fascinated by the very destruction of the human, he does not stage before oneself the task of revealing only social problems, because of which life in the provinces is so hard and dull.
Key
For creating vivid images Sologub uses the entire symbolist poetic arsenal, sparing no colors. Exaggerations piled on top of each other, imaginary evil spirits and sorceresses, an accentuated longing for another world, a peculiar grammar - all this makes the gray provincial little world look like scary tale, which, nevertheless, is not so far from the terrible reality, so the reader should carefully follow how the phantasmagoria flows into a reflection of reality and vice versa.
Context
Of course, such a work of modernist literature could not have appeared without a careful study of Western and domestic symbolist ideas, trends and themes (for example, in some episodes one can see Nietzscheanism rethought in the context of modernism), but first of all Sologub relied on his personal experience. He had to work in provincial schools for about ten years before he managed to move to St. Petersburg, so he wrote about what, to his great displeasure, he knew and understood well. According to the author, all the characters in the novel had real prototypes, even Peredonov has a certain teacher, Stakhov, allegedly even more insane than Ardalyon Borisovich himself.
Fedor Sologub. Petty Imp (1902)
A novel about a provincial sadistic teacher Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, one of the most popular works Russian modernist prose - during the life of Sologub, more than ten editions of the book were published, and today it is still published and read. Perhaps, before The Little Demon, there were no notable novels in Russia whose protagonist could become such a repulsive character (the only exception is Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlevs: Judas Golovlev, without a doubt, Peredonov's direct predecessor): any positive human he is completely devoid of qualities, but all the negative ones are grotesquely (and with great talent) exaggerated by the author. Here is how Sologub describes Peredonov: “His feelings were dull, and his consciousness was a corrupting and deadly apparatus. Everything that reached his consciousness turned into filth and filth. Faults in objects caught his eye and pleased him. […] He did not have favorite objects, just as he did not have favorite people - and therefore nature could only act on his feelings in one direction, only oppress them. Also meeting people. Especially with strangers and strangers, who cannot be said to be rude. To be happy for him meant doing nothing and, shutting himself off from the world, pleasing his womb.
Peredonov is a vicious, envious gossip and paranoid; his only dream is to move up the career ladder, to become an inspector. Careerism is perhaps the only human trait of Ardalyon Borisovich, and the rest of the qualities, thanks to which people manage to get along with each other, he either lost a long time ago, or never had them at all. To call Peredonov a villain does not turn the tongue: he is painfully cowardly, vindictive and petty boor, doing nasty things on the sly (or if he is sure of his complete impunity). In the end, Peredonov reaches complete madness: his second cousin Varvara tricks him into marrying him, assuring him that for this he will get the position of inspector, but the appointment does not come, Peredonov's suspiciousness and obsession grow, and in the finale he finally loses his mind and kills his henchman Volodin, whom the failed inspector considers a werewolf who can turn into a ram.
However, the complete absence of those features that classical humanism praised in a person cannot be called Peredonov's distinguishing feature: practically all the inhabitants of the provincial town where the action takes place are the same petty demons as he is, albeit not as bright and inventive.
See
At least four more Russian novels are devoted to the transformation of people into non-humans, the action of which also takes place in the provinces: of course, these are “ Dead Souls”, “Demons”, the already mentioned “Lord Golovlevs” and similar to “Demons” in subject matter, but completely independent and no less impressive anti-nihilistic novel by Nikolai Leskov “On the Knives”. All of them are written in a different context and in a different aesthetics, but they also depict people who have lost or are losing their human qualities and appearance.
"City of Life of Death" (2009) is a relatively unknown Chinese film about one of the most terrible episodes of the Japanese-Chinese war. 1937, Japanese troops enter the capital of China, the city of Nanjing, and a terrible massacre begins, several hundred thousand people die in a few weeks. The ability to kill and rape with impunity quickly dehumanizes Japanese soldiers. Chinese prisoners and civilians are no longer people for them, but dolls with which you can do whatever you want.
- Reception
- Context
Reception
Camus narrates in the first person, so we look at the world through the eyes of a man who has atrophied almost everything human: a rather unusual experience for those who usually worry about relatives, rejoice at the beginning of a new romance and do not shoot around at strangers.
Context
Camus was born and raised in Algeria, his childhood was not easy: his father died in the First World War; mother, a semi-deaf and illiterate Spaniard, earned her living by unskilled labor. Albert himself suffered from tuberculosis, suffered for a long time from the consequences of the disease, due to which, despite all his talents, he could not engage in postgraduate education (he wrote a diploma on the influence of Plotinus's ideas on Blessed Augustine) and as a result never became a professional philosopher. In general, the French writer and thinker had more than enough biographical reasons for assessing the state of contemporary humanity without much optimism. Later, about The Stranger, Camus will say: "I tried to portray in the face of my hero the only Christ we deserve."
Albert Camus. Outsider (1942)
This work is considered to be one of the key texts of literary existentialism. A Frenchman by the name of Meursault (we do not know his name) works as a petty clerk and lives in the Algerian suburbs. This is a dispassionate person, living as if half asleep, responding to external stimuli with the simplest reactions: with complete indifference he buries his mother, whom he handed over to an almshouse three years ago, takes a mistress with indifference, and then, for no particular reason, kills an Arab on the beach (due to strong in the heat, his mind becomes cloudy, and he shoots at him, "as if knocking on the door of misfortune with four short blows"). Meursault explains his act in this way - by heat, he is sentenced to death. Only in a prison cell, on the verge of death, an insight descends on him, and Meursault suddenly begins to feel the whole depth of life - as the existentialist philosophers understood it.
However, if we look closely at this character, we will see in him an exemplary image of dehumanization (it is difficult to say whether at least some human values!), moreover, created when the mass extermination of people in the camps was just looming on the horizon. Camus seems to want to say: look, western culture in company with Darwin and Freud, she explained to us what a person is, cleansed of humanistic and metaphysical husks, well, that's what we got in the end - admire. Even the Darwinian struggle for survival is alien to the outsider: the senseless primitive impulses that drive him lead him straight to death.
See
better understanding The analysis of dehumanization in The Outsider will be more likely to help not Camus’ philosophical essays like The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebellious Man (although, of course, they are also worth reading), but primary sources: for example, Sigmund Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis (the most simple introduction in his theory - lectures given to the general public) and "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin (this work is much longer and more complicated, but a lot has been written about it - it will not be difficult to find a summary).
"Paths of Glory" (1957)
The movie that made Stanley Kubrick famous. World War I; a French army unit is sent to attack the German positions. The offensive was horribly planned, everyone knew that it would end in defeat, but still someone had to blame. Three soldiers are chosen as switchmen, they are judged for a long and painful time, and then they are shot. A person is no longer every individual person, but only a part of a huge mass in identical overcoats.
- Reception
- Context
Reception
"Kolyma stories" are written in a kind of "zero" style, without bright tropes and poetic beauties. The author's intonation is emphatically calm and objective. Hysteria has no place in camp literature, Shalamov argued, and his firm, low voice throughout the entire collection never breaks into a cry, no matter what horrors are discussed.
Key
Shalamov set himself an almost impossible task: to clothe literary form an experience that defies description and analysis. The foundation of his work is the solution of this unsolvable task, which requires the writer to give full dedication and utmost honesty - first of all, to himself.
Context
Shalamov spent a total of 22 years in the camps, neither before nor after he took an anti-Soviet position, but, unlike Solzhenitsyn, who published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he was never able to publish Kolyma Tales in the USSR during his lifetime. . Even after the death of Stalin, the innocently condemned writer, who lived for many years in inhuman conditions, could not achieve a human attitude towards himself.
Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories (1954–1962)
As you know, "Kolyma stories" were written by Shalamov on biographical material. The ultimate experience of preserving the human in the conditions of dehumanization is clothed in an artistic form, so the Kolyma Tales should be read in two optics at once: as the most reliable historical document and as an outstanding literary work. Both of these sides, with the author's complete absence of sentimentality and vindictiveness, complement and complicate each other. Shalamov's stories remain a work that dissects dehumanization with unsurpassed accuracy, rigor and artistic power.
In a short note “What I saw and understood in the camp,” Shalamov wrote: “[I saw] the extreme fragility of human culture and civilization. A man became a beast in three weeks - with hard work, cold, hunger and beatings. "Kolyma stories" - real encyclopedia inhumanity: there is no such baseness and meanness that the one who was broken by the camp would not go to.
"Is this a man?" (1946) - famous book Italian and Jewish writer Primo Levi, who was arrested for participating in the Italian anti-fascist movement and spent about a year in Auschwitz (he was released Soviet troops; of the 650 Italian Jews in Auschwitz, only twenty survived). The main theme of his first work is the transformation of the human into the inhuman; this is the most important book for understanding how dehumanization works: because of the inhumanity of the executioners in the death camps, their victims themselves became inhumane.
- Context
Context
Zimbardo's experiment was commissioned Navy The United States, whose authorities tried to find out the causes of conflicts in their correctional institutions. The results of the study were reported to the US Department of Justice, which was engaged in bloody riots in some American prisons, and in 2004, when the scandal broke out with the Abu Grave prison - an Iraqi military prison where prisoners were tortured - Zimbardo was on the team of lawyers who defended one of the guards of this prison. institutions (he was sentenced to eight years), and then used the experience of participating in this trial to write the book The Lucifer Effect.
Philip Zimbardo. Lucifer effect. Why Good People Turn into Villains (2007)
In 1971, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University, based on which the book The Lucifer Effect was later written. The essence of the experiment was that the volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners in a "prison" located in the basement of the psychology department. Zimbardo, who himself played the role of prison manager, tried to find out how a person reacts to the restriction of freedom and the conditions of prison life - and came to disappointing conclusions. Volunteers quickly got used to their roles: those who played the role of prisoners became weak-willed and submissive, and those who played the role of guards became sadists (although the experiment lasted only six days!). IN shortest period conflicts began between the prisoners and the guards, which the latter began to brutally suppress, and the actions of both of them were not much different from what is happening in real prisons. Soon, the prisoners were forced to wash latrines with their bare hands, deprived of food, and so on - in a word, the conventions of the experiment turned out to be enough for some of the volunteers to be divided by lot, that is, in fact, interchangeable volunteers (and all of them were mentally stable, white and belonged to the middle class) was deprived of human dignity and became the object of extremely cruel treatment, despite the fact that the guards were strictly forbidden any physical violence. All this indicated that the situation affects the behavior of people much more than their personal qualities, and two completely ordinary people without special external causes can suddenly turn into an executioner and a victim.
How is dehumanization understood?
Studies like those conducted by Zimbardo can tell us a lot about the fragility of the human, about the unreliability of humanistic values and ideals, which in themselves turn out to be inactive - it is enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the tacit consent of society. However, such experiments do not give broad generalizations, they require a different level of reflection, and, of course, Western philosophy of the past two centuries could not bypass this problem.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to come to the conclusion that humanism has suffered a complete collapse, and now a reassessment of all values is coming. His view is pessimistic, and at the same time encouraging: humanity has reached a dead end, but a superman is coming to replace man: “What is a monkey in relation to man? A laughing stock or a painful shame. And the same must be the man for the overman: a laughing stock or a painful shame” (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”). The 20th century showed that fears about the strength of old values were fully justified, but nothing good came of the superman: an attempt to update human nature instead of improved humanism, it gave the exact opposite result. At the beginning of the last century, some hoped for the renewal and purification of mankind, others believed that it was not necessary to look for new ones to replace the old humanistic values - it was enough to rid the old ones of the superfluous and re-actualize them, therefore, at the end of the positivist-Darwinist era, a heightened interest in religion suddenly arose, which many considered it a means of patching up holes in humanism - although in the 18th century it was in religious prejudices that the philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the root of all evils, subject to complete destruction.
An interesting attempt to rehabilitate religious humanism was made in the second half of the last century by the anthropologist René Girard. According to his concept, dehumanizing violence, now and then sweeping over different societies in waves, can be stopped with the help of the victim - Girard calls her a scapegoat. The victim is deprived of human traits, excluded from the human collective and destroyed, due to which social tension drops to zero and begins to grow again until it reaches extreme point- and then everything will repeat again. There is a way out of this vicious circle: it is the voluntary sacrifice of Christ, who accepts the torment on the cross, so that violence is stopped, so that there are no more scapegoats - you just need to correctly learn his lessons and teachings. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben thinks a lot about exclusion and rejection: in his program work “Homo Sacer. Sovereign power and bare life," he argues that under the guise of parliamentary democracy, there is always the possibility of introducing a state of emergency, suspending the right and subjecting a person to exclusion, reducing him to the state of "bare life" - and therefore the basis contemporary politics is not a city, but a concentration camp.
The catastrophe of the middle of the 20th century forced many European intellectuals to look at the problem of dehumanization in a new way. Of course, their main thought was that something like this should never happen again, but a rigorous analysis of causes and effects led to a very non-trivial conclusion: dehumanization is based on Western humanism itself, a hierarchical system of values that has accumulated so many contradictions over the centuries that in the end she turned into her own opposite. The only logical conclusion from this analysis was that traditional metaphysics and hierarchical thinking should be completely destroyed, which subordinates a person to dead abstractions and, for the sake of certain ideals, allows one part of society to turn another into non-humans. In a word, it was an attempt to knock out a wedge with a wedge, to oppose real dehumanization to intellectual dehumanization, shifting the focus from a person (who has turned from the center of the universe into a constructed object, easily vulnerable and amenable to manipulation) to sign systems and practices that completely determine the existence of a person, his identity, its values and social relations. It is difficult to say how productive this project was (the greatest contribution was made by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and other French thinkers): perhaps it is thanks to him that humanity still maintains a delicate balance and does not fall into the abyss of complete dehumanization.
Other books about dehumanization
Diary of Anne FrankThe diary of a Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp, which she kept in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, is one of the most terrible and reliable evidence of dehumanization of the 20th century.
Jean Amery. Beyond Crime and PunishmentJean Amery - Austrian writer, member of the Resistance. For anti-Nazi propaganda, he was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, spent almost two years in concentration camps. After the war, he was released, changed his name, remaking it in the French manner (the real name of the writer is Hans Mayer), and for a long time refused to set foot on German soil, write in German and talk about the camp experience. In 1966, his work “Beyond Crime and Punishment” was published - one of the most important books about the Holocaust: Amery tries to outline ways in it for creating a new humanism, starting from the figure of a Jewish prisoner who is doomed to destruction.
Viktor Frankl. Man in search of meaningThe famous Austrian psychologist and psychotherapist, the creator of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, was also a concentration camp prisoner. In the camp he provided psychological help prisoners, prevented suicide. Frankl's seminal work is called Man's Search for Meaning, in which he talks about his experiences of surviving in the camp and explains how to find meaning in life, even if he finds himself in such monstrous and inhuman conditions.
That classic literature- a stronghold of humanism, we are told already at school. However, in various works of art, we are faced not only with high humanistic ideals, but also with their direct opposite - inhumanity. Gorky talks about what dehumanization is, using the books of Grigorovich, Sologub, Shalamov and others as an example.
In my opinion the problem modern society in relation to the whole world as a whole, without touching on some individual local civilizations, is associated with such a concept as freedom. In general, I would like to note that culture as such is able to exist due to the harmonious correlation of such concepts as sanctions and freedom. When sanctions dominate, totalitarian or authoritarian regime, the development of society is hindered due to the impossibility of developing culture, there is no opportunity to embody certain ideas, and when freedom dominates excessively, the development of negative manifestations of culture is allowed.
In general, chaos appears, society degrades, its self-destruction sets in. In order to restore it, it is necessary to return to a harmonious ratio of sanctions and freedom.
Now the problem of permitting or prohibiting certain things is so acute, since in certain areas of the life of society there was initially an attitude towards humanity in relation to this or that due to the assumption of this, but it turned out quite the opposite. Questions arise as to whose position this or that aspect turns out to be humane, however, it should be noted that in the modern world there is an orientation towards freedom of choice, but the moment that this freedom turns out to be negative is forgotten. It has a detrimental effect on the one for whom it is intended. However, I would like to point out that here in question about political freedom. This is the only area that is not touched too sharply here, since it is clear that in this discourse this topic cannot be considered from positions other than democratic, which presupposes the predominance of freedom over sanctions.
On the one hand, the dominance of freedom in relation to the sanction takes into account the fact that a person can express himself as he is, without being forced to choose one or another version of something. And this, of course, is good: he is in complete control of himself. Here, if he chose something wrong, he is solely to blame, but there is also such a moment: not always such a presence of freedom does not affect the interests and / or well-being of other persons. This is manifested in a variety of phenomena of life, and there is also the question: how to correctly correlate sanctions and freedom so that it really is harmonious and allows culture to develop. Indeed, this question simply cannot be bypassed. Considering, in particular, freedom in the context of means mass media, then it becomes clear that, firstly, it is practically impossible to control the quality of the released information, as well as its content regarding whether it is moral or not, offends someone's rights or not, but still it should
it should be noted that it should be subjected to some control: children also view it, and if it does not meet certain criteria, then their idea of \u200b\u200bthe proper order of things is distorted, their psyche is injured. Also very often we can observe various morally unacceptable releases of media products.
What to do with it? The answer here in general is this: it is impossible to control all this in general, completely, and the only way to protect yourself from their influence is not to use what, from the point of view of its consumer, turns out to be immoral.
However, there are those spheres of human activity where it is impossible to do without a significant imposition of sanctions. This is the sphere of legislation, healthcare, education, culture. A society can be called humane only if what is harmful and what is permitted, of course, what is useful, is limited by sanctions.
So why does it still turn out that present stage development of society is dominated by freedom and this turns out to be a negative moment in relation to its development and functioning in general?
To do this, in my opinion, we can turn to the concept of "publicity" - "privacy" by Hannah Arendt. I believe that at the present stage of development of society, the trend towards privacy is dominant. Moreover, due to the installation on almost complete freedom. Of course, there are a number of significant restrictions and penalties. But still, a number of consequences are not provided that follow the permission of certain things. Let's give some examples. If we take such a phenomenon of modern society as euthanasia, then, as we know, this is a permitted process. It would seem that the doomed patient has the freedom of choice. And so are his relatives. However, few people thought that the patient himself was put in such a situation “Kill yourself if you feel sorry for your relatives and their money for your treatment!”. AND that's what happens: slavery! Slavery to one's own freedom. Yes, there is a choice, but it is arranged in such a way that it forces you to act! Or an example with the death penalty: “Let the murderer pay with his life for killing someone!”, but, as it turns out, here the question is not only about the life of the defendant: but who thought about those who will have to carry out death penalty? Let a person agree to go to such a “work”, but who thought about him, about his feelings? After all, one way or another, his psyche is injured, even when the buttons are pressed by a certain number of people and it is not clear who did kill him.
Or the problem of abortion: in cases where a child is killed due to so-called personal circumstances, and not because it is impossible to give birth for health reasons: when an adult is killed, the killers are sent to prison, and when a person is a few weeks old, they even help kill him. And no one will even think that he has his own right to life, freedom of choice, and that he is just too small to protect himself. And there are many more such examples. In a word, it is necessary to change certain spheres of the life of society so that the freedom that is given does not harm those for whom it is intended.
Here, of course, there is the question of which model of society is ideal, what does the ideal ratio of sanction and freedom look like. Of course, it is extremely difficult to talk about this and it seems hardly possible to put forward the ideal concept of such a society: each society develops individually anyway, has its own characteristics, but here it is necessary to take into account that the principles of humanism and the preservation of human life, assistance to those in need, etc. .P. If you try to take Christianity as an ideal, then the fact is that other societies dominated by another religion will not want to accept the maxims of this worldview, therefore, at the level of the world community, world-class organizations, certain specific humane principles must be observed that affect each society and correct their legislation. This is necessary, because otherwise there will be endless questions about how to resolve another conflict that has destroyed masses of people. In general, freedom prevails in the world, but there are societies in which there is a dominance of sanctions. But here again, the problem of the predominance of freedom: many of the actions that take place in such societies are inhumane, and they are said to be their choice, their right to this or that way of life, while many people inside such systems do not agree with this and they can't do anything about their position.
Julia Volskaya
Quality perfume should cost and look attractive. Elite perfumery has now become available not only to high society, but also to any Internet user.
X. Ortega y Gasset's concept of culture determined his solution to other problems, including his theory of culture. But also the teaching of X. Ortega y Gasset about culture was at the same time largely conditioned by a specific social - historical situation European bourgeois society in the first half of the 20th century. "The division of labor, in the conditions of bourgeois society, leading to a widening gap between the physical and mental labor, between material and spiritual production, and the closely related process of alienation, as a result of which the individual turns into a unilaterally developed appendage industrial production, led to the fact that in the process of production the individual gradually ceased to act as a subject of cultural and historical action. Reflecting this process and trying to comprehend it, bourgeois thinkers, starting with the Enlightenment, contrasted the work of people and their activities in the field of culture.
The concept of culture of X. Ortega y Gasset had several aspects corresponding to the stages of development of his philosophy, but in all cases the philosopher opposed the emerging bourgeois mass culture as a pseudo-culture with the standards of thinking embedded in it, thereby leading a person away from independent - in this case, through familiarization with culture - the development of the world, from the tasks of independent comprehension of one's being. In the works of X. Ortega y Gasset, the term "mass culture" is not used, but the features of bourgeois culture as "mass culture" become the object of his criticism.
The concept of culture by X. Ortega y Gasset, set forth in The Theme of Our Time, is distinguished by a certain biologization. But, linking culture with the biological life of a person, Ortega thus opposed the anonymity of understanding culture, tried to present true culture as part of a person’s own individual being, as something that does not exist outside of him, but only in interaction with him.
Another aspect of X. Ortega y Gasset's teachings about culture is connected with an attempt to reveal it as a system of ideas about the world and about man, which governs the everyday existence of man in the world. X. Ortega y Gasset considered culture as a means, a tool that helps a person in his life. A person is often compared by X. Ortega y Gasset with a shipwrecked person: in order to be saved, he must grab onto something: as a means of salvation, he grabs at culture, its principles, values, ideas. From the point of view of X. Ortega y Gasset, culture is a system of clear and firm ideas, a set of beliefs.
X. Ortega y Gasset's study of culture as a system of not only ideas, but ideas-beliefs is closely connected with his critique of bourgeois culture, which was turning into mass culture.
Emphasizing the connection of culture with the life of the individual, X. Ortega y Gasset sought to disturb the bourgeois consciousness that had reassured itself, forcing it modern representatives to return again to the awareness of the drama of life and the need for a person to reckon with this drama.
In connection with the analysis of culture X. Ortega y Gasset “raised the question of what constitutes complex world ideas of man. Noting that the ideas of man have a different nature, he first of all dwelled on the difference between the ideas of science and the ideas of culture.
“A person knows the ideas of science, is obliged to reckon with them, without them he cannot live at the level of his time. For example, physics and its way of thinking are for X. Ortega y Gasset one of internal engines souls of modern European man. Man lives by the ideas of culture. Culture is a sphere of effective beliefs about what the world is and what neighbors are, about what is the hierarchy of objects and actions.
Therefore, the ideas-beliefs that make up culture, in contrast to the ideas-knowledge of science, X. Ortega y Gasset designated as living ideas. Culture is a system of living ideas that every time has.
These ideas-beliefs related to the sphere of culture, X. Ortega y Gasset called beliefs, emphasizing that they should not be confused.
In his discussions about culture, the Spanish thinker expressed his awareness of the crisis in the worldview of a man of the bourgeois world. The system of ideas that fed the consciousness of this man and served as the spiritual basis of his existence in the world showed its inconsistency. The man of the bourgeois world had a certain ideological arsenal, a certain set of ideas. But by the 20th century, it became clear that these ideas do not represent worldview truths. In the ideological system of a person of bourgeois society, numerous voids formed, which began to be filled with artificially created theoretical constructions, with the help of which they tried to explain and justify this world. The more voids arose, the more pseudo-ideas about the world were created.
The totality of pseudo-ideas about the world created that culture, which had lost touch with the living reality of human life, which, having turned into mass culture, assumed the functions of a dream factory.
Making everything more ideas that arise in the place of human beliefs, led to an overproduction of ideas. The teachings of X. Ortega y Gasset about culture recorded the presence of a mass of ideas that exist outside of connection with real beliefs modern man. He stated that his era - the first half of the 20th century - is experiencing great anxiety, which ultimately arose from the fact that after a long period of abundant creation of intellectual products and maximum attention to it, a person does not know what to do with ideas. The modern European is beginning to feel that their role in life is different from what they were given before, but he does not yet know their true place in his life.
X. Ortega y Gasset, in his doctrine of culture, raised in an idealistic form the question of the ideological basis of human life, trying to determine in which layers of human consciousness it is rooted. Pointing to the appearance a large number ideas that are not rooted in the mind of a person, not perceived by him as constituting his life reality, X. Ortega y Gasset fixed the crisis of the bourgeois worldview, bourgeois ideology. But for him, this led to the conclusion that it was necessary to turn not to a system of ideas scientifically investigating the problems of human existence in the modern world, but to ideas that are inseparable from human life. The selection by him of special ideas - ideas-beliefs indicates that X. Ortega y Gasset himself intended to look for the foundations of the worldview in the layers of human consciousness close to ordinary consciousness, in other words, in the totality of ideas that a person possesses before the beginning of his scientific understanding of the world and which by its nature is very close to the "vital mind". X. Ortega y Gasset separated culture from science, pointing out the different nature of their truths. The truths of science, according to him, are anonymous, they exist objectively, independently in relation to man. The truths of culture have meaning only when they become part of his life.
Since X. Ortega y Gasset defines true culture as a "living" culture, i.e., inseparable from the life of individuals, familiarizing a person with cultural values implies, firstly, the acceptance by an individual of certain cultural values, his personal familiarization with them and, secondly, the appeal of the individual to certain cultural values due to his spontaneous, internal personal needs. In other words, a person can treat the ideas and truths of science as existing independently of him. The values of culture exist for a person only if he is personally affected by them, if he recreated them for himself, included them in his world, made them his personal property.
Culture, thus, appears in the teachings of X. Ortega y Gasset “as a sphere that performs special functions in human life. Scientific ideas, giving a person knowledge about the external world, orient him in this world in accordance with the laws that operate in it. The ideas of culture are designed to help a person in his internal orientation.
The main problem is the existence of a person in the modern world, in this case in the world of modern culture. He puts before the individual a very important mass society task: to comprehend the nature of modern bourgeois culture, to overcome its influence, to free oneself from the standards of thinking contained in it, and to revive in oneself the ability to genuinely join culture, to genuine cultural activities. However, at the same time, the struggle for authenticity in the sphere of cultural activity, the struggle against the standards that put pressure on his consciousness, acts as a personal task of the individual, in the solution of which he can and must rely only on himself.
