Essay “Social issues in M. Gorky’s play “At the Lower Depths”

In the play “At the Bottom,” her philosophical wisdom is surprising. Gorky managed to immerse us in the life of the Kostylevo doss house, make us think about the problems that concern him, the playwright, and some of his heroes. Among the dirt, drunken screams, card games, money transactions, people who are capable of rising to philosophical heights in understanding the complex and difficult issues of life live and do not dissolve in that everyday life.
First of all, Luke attracts attention. The name of this hero is noteworthy. On the one hand, it comes from the word “evil one,” which has a double meaning. He is a cunning, clever, deceiving man - and at the same time a good-natured, playful person. Both of these semantic poles are contained in the word “evil” and in the character of this character. On the other hand, this name recalls one of the apostles, the creator of the “Gospel” of Luke. This means that before us is a certain bearer of wisdom, bringing to people something new, his Gospel - a certain truth. It’s not for nothing that he’s a wanderer. This concept is often associated with the concept of “truth seeker.”
What is the truth and wisdom of Luke? This hero is convinced that one must be able to feel sorry for a person, especially when it is difficult for him, that one must show him compassion. This position is close to us in its own way today, when we think a lot about mercy, about helping disadvantaged people; but this compassion takes on a very unique form in Luke. He believes that people are more afraid of the real truth of life, because it is too harsh. To make their situation easier, you need to embellish their life, bring into it a fairy tale, a beautiful deception, a “golden dream”. It is curious that after Luke’s reasoning, the Actor, who listens attentively to him, unexpectedly recalls poems on this topic:
Gentlemen, if the truth is holy
The world won't be able to find its way,
Honor the madman who inspires
Humanity has a golden dream.
These poems by the French poet Bérenger are, of course, addressed to Luke or others like him. It is Luka who plays the role of the madman who evokes a golden dream for each of the night shelters. That is why he is so affectionate with people, calling them “darling”, “dove”, “baby”; so he tells Anna about the afterlife, Ash about the golden country of Siberia, and Actor about a hospital with marble floors. All these are varieties of the same “golden dream”.
A completely different point of view is shared by two other inhabitants of the shelter: Baron and Bubnov. Once a rich aristocrat who had descended to the position of a pimp, the Baron has left hundreds of serfs, carriages with coats of arms far in the past and understands perfectly well that all this cannot be returned. And Satin aptly remarks to him: “You can’t go far in the carriage of the past.” And now the Baron, completely devastated, does not believe in anything, does not dream of anything. And this became his position, his philosophy. He utters, for example, his cherished phrase: “I don’t expect anything. Everything has already... happened! It's over... it's over! Therefore, he does not console anyone, he insists on facts from which you cannot escape.
Bubnov adheres to related positions. This man once suffered a lot in life. Life made him an indifferent cynic, a person who did not believe in anything. Bubnov recognizes only what exists. He states the harsh truth of life: “But I don’t know how to lie! For what? In my opinion, tell the whole truth as it is! Why be ashamed? And Bubnov is not shy. He speaks his truths like a caw. And it’s no coincidence that Ash calls him exactly that: “Raven.” Bubnov declares all people’s dreams unnecessary and false: “Color, crow, feathers... go ahead!” - he says to Nastya in response to her dreams of a student’s love. Bubnov is deeply convinced of this. that he does not need such “coloring”, and for the edification of others he tells that he, Bubnov, once repainted dogs into raccoons in a dyeing shop, which is why his hands were constantly red, but now they have become simply dirty. So “no matter how you paint yourself, everything will be erased, only one naked person will remain.”
It is not difficult to see in these arguments the philosophy of naked fact that Bubnov professes. He says: “People all live... like chips floating down a river.” Bubnov's truth is a very cruel, wingless truth.
The third philosophical position in the play is expressed and defended by Satin. This is a former telegraph operator who once read a lot and performed on stage. While reading, he did not blindly trust what was written, but analyzed and tested what he had learned with his extraordinary critical mind. Satin rejects lies, all kinds of illusions, golden dreams, fairy tales about life. According to him, “lie is the religion of slaves and masters.” The Kostylevs need lies to deceive people like night shelters. And the latter need it to justify their humiliated and powerless position or to console themselves with pitiful and vain hopes. Therefore, Satin says quite frankly that Luke lied and misled everyone.
At the same time, Satin also speaks out against the inhuman “truth” of Bubnov and Baron. According to Satin, one must live in the present, soberly assessing reality, but at the same time with a dream about the future, divorced from real life. And this is the real Truth. Such truth, which is based on deep faith in man, in his infinite possibilities, in his exceptional potential powers, is the “God of free man.” Satin reflects not on a specific person, now oppressed by need and oppression, but on man in general. This is precisely a philosophical view of life. The time will come when people will be united and united by common deeds and ideas. People will be valued most of all in this society. He will become free, full-fledged, harmoniously developed, beautiful and majestic. Everything will be in man and everything will be for man. This is why, Satin argues, one must respect a person; not to feel sorry, not to humiliate him with pity, but to respect him. This will be the basis of the morality of the society of the future, so the name of Man will sound proudly.
Perhaps. Satin in vain denies compassion, pity, mercy. These feelings can coexist perfectly with respect for a person. But Satin values the attention to the human personality, the sensitivity to it that Luke showed. That is why Satin declares: “The old man is not a charlatan... he affected me like acid on an old and dirty coin”; in other words. Luke gave Gorky's hero the impetus for reflection and for his broad generalizations, which absorbed the high philosophical truth of life. Gorky here entrusted Satin with his own innermost thoughts.
This clash of three main positions in Gorky's play strikes surprising sparks. They give food to the mind. They deeply excite readers and do not leave them indifferent. After all, even today, many decades after the play was written, we are thinking about what is the truth and meaning of life, is it necessary to constantly talk in newspapers, on radio and television, in everyday life about its difficulties, without hiding the truth from people, or, to be Maybe you need to trust optimistic forecasts, prophecies of psychics, political scientists, fortune tellers. And today we reflect on compassion for a person whose life is especially difficult these days. And Gorky’s play, its deep philosophical wisdom, helps to understand all this.

Problems of M. Gorky's play "At the Depths"

In the 1900s, a severe economic crisis broke out in Russia. After each crop failure, masses of ruined, impoverished peasants wandered around the country in search of income. And factories and factories were closed. Thousands of workers and peasants found themselves homeless and without a means of subsistence. Under the influence of severe economic oppression, a huge number of tramps appear who sink to the “bottom” of life.

Taking advantage of the hopeless situation of impoverished people, enterprising owners of dark slums found a way to extract benefit from their fetid basements, turning them into flophouses where the unemployed, beggars, tramps, thieves and other “former people” found shelter. The play “At the Bottom”, written in 1902, depicted the life of these people.

Gorky himself wrote about his play: “It was the result of my almost twenty years of observations of the world of “former people,” among whom I include not only wanderers, shelter dwellers and “lumpen proletarians” in general, but also some of the intellectuals, “demagnetized” ", disappointed, insulted and humiliated by failures in life. I felt and realized very early that these people were incurable." But the play not only completed the theme of tramps, but also resolved new revolutionary demands that were put before the masses during the period of intense class struggle between the pre-revolutionary era.

The action of the play "At the Bottom" takes place in a gloomy, semi-dark basement, like a cave, with a vaulted, low ceiling that presses on people with its stone weight, where it is dark, there is no space and it is difficult to breathe. The furnishings in this basement are also wretched: instead of chairs there are dirty stumps of wood, a roughly knocked together table, and bunks along the walls. Thieves, cheaters, beggars, cripples - everyone who was thrown out of life - gathered here; different in their habits, life behavior, past fate, but equally hungry, exhausted and useless to anyone: the former aristocrat Baron, the drunken Actor, the former intellectual Satin, the mechanic-craftsman Kleshch, the fallen woman Nastya, the thief Vaska. They have nothing, everything has been taken away, lost, erased and trampled into the dirt.

The motley gallery of characters in the play are victims of the capitalist order. Even here, at the very bottom of life, exhausted and completely destitute, they serve as an object of exploitation, even here the owners, the philistine owners, do not stop at any crime and try to squeeze a few pennies out of them. The fate of all these people and the very existence of the “bottom” proves the illegality of the capitalist system and serves as an exposure and formidable accusation of the bourgeois world.

With great revealing force, Gorky attacked the bourgeois philosophy of consoling lies. Luke considers all people insignificant, pitiful, weak, incapable of actively fighting for their rights and in need of condolences and consolation. Luke is a sower of illusions, comforting fairy tales, which desperate, weak people greedily grabbed. “White lies” is the principle that Luke follows. He inspires Vaska Pepl with the idea of going to Siberia, where he can start a new, honest life; The actor promises to name the city where he is cured of alcoholism in a luxurious hospital; He calms the dying Anna with the hope that for her unbearable torment on earth, after death she will find peace and eternal bliss in heaven. Luke's comforting lie meets with sympathy from the night shelters. They believe him because they want to believe in the existence of another truth, because they passionately want to break out of the shelter and make their way to another life, although the path to it is unclear.

Gorky in an interview in 1903. spoke about the main question posed in the play: “The main question that I wanted to pose is - what is better, truth or compassion? What is more necessary? Is it necessary to take compassion to the point of using lies, like Luke?” Comforters are hated by Gorky, and in the image of Luke the writer exposed their inconsistency. The solution to the question of what needs to be done to change life and destroy the “bottom” is given in his speeches by Satin, whose image more fully highlights the harmfulness of Luke’s comforting sermons. Gorky does not idealize this image: like other tramps, Satin is incapable of either socially useful work or revolutionary action; he is infected with anarchic sentiments. He has many vices, instilled in him by the shelter: he is a drunkard and a sharper, sometimes cruel and cynical, but still, what distinguishes him from other tramps is his intelligence, relative education and breadth of nature. In the night shelter, the famous words of Satin are heard, declaring the right of “man to personal freedom and human dignity”: “Everything is in man, everything is for man! Only man exists, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain! Man! This is "Great! It sounds... proud! A man! We must respect a person! Don't feel sorry... don't humiliate him with pity... we must respect him!"

These words expressed the highest dreams of the pre-revolutionary period and received real embodiment only in our era. "Lies are the religion of slaves and masters... Truth is the god of a free man!" Such a statement by Satin was perceived as a revolutionary call, as a “signal for an uprising.” Declaring his deep faith in the creative powers, intelligence and abilities of a free person, Gorky affirmed the lofty ideas of humanism. Gorky understood that in the mouth of the drunken youth Satin, the speech about a proud and free man sounded artificial, but it had to sound in the play, expressing the innermost ideals of the author himself and noting that this speech, “except Satin... there is no one to say, and better, To put it more clearly, he cannot." With his play “At the Bottom,” Gorky refutes all the ideas of a reactionary-idealistic order: the ideas of non-resistance, forgiveness, humility, making it clear what forces the future belongs to. The whole play is imbued with faith in man. The play was accepted as a storm-petrel play, which foreshadowed the coming storm and called to the storm.

Ministry of General and Vocational Education

Volga Region Academy of Public Administration

Man as a philosophical

problem

(abstract)

Department of Constitutional Law

Completed by: applicant Strelnikov

Vladilen Vladimirovich

Saratov 2002

Introduction

Human nature and the nature of the philosophical concept

The Essence of Human Genesis

The meaning of human existence

List of used literature

INTRODUCTION

The problem of man, the meaning of his existence, has always interested human minds. In the works of every philosopher, from antiquity to modernity, one can find reflections on the nature of man and his essence. This topic was, is and will be relevant at all times; it is as eternal as philosophy itself. Humanity at all stages of its development has always faced this question and at each stage it was implemented by thinkers in different ways. Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going and why do we exist? - these are the questions to which we will always look for answers, convince other people that this is right, then rethink, create new concepts, and this will continue as long as the human race lives.

During the present century, especially in its last third, interest in the problem of man has intensified. The growing criticism of science and, in particular, the natural scientific approach to the study of the human world, the awareness of its limitations led to a reorientation of philosophy from science to culture as a whole. The civilized turn currently underway, the transformation of industrial civilization into an information society, sharply increases the role of human individuality and creativity in man in the development of all spheres of society.

An important feature of our time is the departure from the historical scene of the totalitarian regimes that dominated in the recent past, the past and ongoing decolonization, the trend of transition to a socially oriented, democratic legal society, the catastrophic decline in the material and social status of a person in our country, resulting in increased attention to the meaning of life, existential issues.

Persistent attempts are being made to create a so-called understanding sociology, personality psychology and other subject-oriented scientific disciplines, reducing interest in epistemological, methodological and ontological issues in the body of philosophy itself. An important role is played by the idea of philosophy, preserved from the time of domination, as a “science of sciences”, its understanding as the basis of sciences, especially those that directly deal with man. Within the framework of this approach, specific characteristics of philosophical knowledge are formulated that are directly related to the topic we are considering.

Science forms the so-called “picture of the world,” while philosophy is a theoretically expressed worldview in which the “picture of the world” is only a moment. The “picture of the world” is characterized by an objective approach. It is a cold summary of data about the world taken by itself, without a person as a person. There is no place for freedom, spontaneity, or creativity. They are in the blind spot of modern science. Philosophy, as the core of a worldview, expresses a person’s attitude to the world. This is not just knowledge, but knowledge clothed in value forms. It explores not the world as such, but the meaning of human existence in the world. For her, a person is not just a thing among things, but a subject capable of changing the world and himself. Considering scientific knowledge as a moment of a person’s relationship to the world, it allows us to take it in a broader context, to go beyond the limits of intrascientific reflection. And moreover, consider the unique features that are inherent only to man and no one else.

HUMAN NATURE AND THE CHARACTER OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT

Philosophical knowledge of a person is essentially the self-consciousness of a person, and a person can be aware of himself only on the condition that he is a cognizing person, i.e. a philosopher engaged in anthropology recognizes himself as a person. This individualization is the fundamental fact, the core and basis of anthropology. But the fact that the thinker realized in himself does not at all make his conclusions subjective. The anthropologist must grasp the living integrity of his personality, the concrete “I,” and for this it is not enough to know only himself. “Around everything that a self-aware philosopher discovers in a second must be built and crystallized, must become a true anthropology, and everything that he finds among people of the present and the past - among men and women, among Indians and residents of China, among vagabonds and emperors, the weak-minded and the geniuses.

Philosophical anthropology becomes a fundamental and central philosophical science when a person becomes a problem, when they begin to think about the questions: what is a person, where did he come from in this world and how does he differ from other living beings.

Who do we mean when we talk about a person? Alexander the Great or Newton, Russian or French, peasant or artisan, man or woman, adult or child? We can say that a person is all people who once lived and are now living. But often people kill other people, i.e. they are denied the right to be human. One person may treat another or others as beings of a lower kind, considering them cogs to carry out his plans, cannon fodder to wage war, etc. And in many people sometimes the animal nature breaks through, such merciless anger and hatred that one might think about them: come on, are these people? Often the very conditions of existence force a person to suppress human qualities in himself, hide them, and constantly change his nature. “In all the elements, man is an executioner, a traitor or a prisoner,” wrote Pushkin.

Each person can call himself a human being, but not everyone admits this. Yes, he himself does not recognize the same person in everyone. Not always, therefore, this name corresponds to reality. Man is a creature that does not always correspond to its concept.

Maybe when asking or talking about a person, we mean ourselves? But if we agree with this, then the question may follow: what is it about me that gives me the right to talk about myself as a person? What makes me human? We must admit that we have no reasonable grounds to consider ourselves human. They say: I have succeeded as a physicist or as an inventor, but no one says: I have succeeded as a person. The ancients believed that to become successful as a person means to build a house, write a book, or grow a tree. But a lot of people didn't do this. Is it possible to deny them the fact that they are people?

When we get to know another person, we are primarily interested not in his human qualities, but in the role, the place he occupies in society, i.e. social characteristics. Man seems to disappear in modern civilization. And this disappearance poses the problem of man with new force. In no other era have views on the origin and essence of man been as unreliable, uncertain and diverse as they are now. In the last ten thousand years of history, our era is the first when man has become completely problematic. He no longer knows what he is, but at the same time he knows that he doesn't know it.

“What kind of chimera is this man? - exclaimed V. Pascal in his famous “Thoughts”, “What an unprecedented thing, what a monster, what chaos, what a field of contradictions, what a miracle!” Judge of all things, senseless earthworm, guardian of truth, cesspool of doubts and errors, glory and rubbish of the universe? Who will unravel this tangle?.. Find out, proud man, that you are a paradox for yourself. Humble yourself, powerless mind! Be silent, senseless nature, learn that man is infinitely higher than man...” No one else, Pascal believed, understood that man is the most excellent of creatures. And yet people value themselves either too high or too low. Raise your eyes to God, some say; look to Him with whom you are so similar and who created you to worship Him. You can become like Him, wisdom will equalize you with Him if you want to follow it.

No matter how abstract, natural-scientific or practical issues the human mind is occupied, all these reflections, in addition to their external goal, are always accompanied by a latent thought about their connection with the person himself - with his inner essence or his needs. The achievement of human freedom and well-being is the meaning of socio-political and scientific-technical progress; art strives to comprehend the secrets of man, and any and every human act is inspired by it. If we remove from the entire diversity of human activity its human-centered core, then both the purpose of any activity and its driving incentives will disappear.

But what is a person? At first glance, this question seems ridiculously simple: who doesn’t know (even intuitively, at least superficially, on an everyday level) what a person is?! However, what is closest to us, what we seem to be familiar with best, turns out to be in fact the most complex object of knowledge. It should be said frankly that, although much in man has already been comprehended (both concretely scientifically and philosophically), much remains mysterious and unclear in his very essence (meaning the essence of a deep order). This is understandable: man is a universe in the Universe! And there are no less secrets in it than in the universe. Moreover, man is the main secret of the universe. And if we talk about inexhaustibility for knowledge of the material world, then all the more inexhaustible is man - the crown of nature’s creativity. The mystery of this phenomenon becomes greater the more we try to penetrate into it. However, the abyss of this problem not only does not scare us away from it, but, on the contrary, attracts us more and more to itself, like a magnet.

The emergence of man is a miracle, just like the emergence of life. Before man arose, life had to arise on Earth, and this emergence was no less a miracle, since dozens of factors had to coincide in order for favorable conditions to be created: systems with one star are extremely rare, usually there are two stars - which means a lot of radiation and excess Sveta; our system is located at the very edge of our Galaxy, in a relatively quiet area; The Earth is at the optimal distance from the Sun (Venus is too hot and Mars is too cold); it has an optimal mass (small planets do not retain an atmosphere, but on large ones it is in a liquid state), etc. It is still unknown whether life in the form of spores was brought to Earth from space or arose chemically. But be that as it may, the life that arose did not necessarily have to develop into humans; it could well have existed in the form of mushrooms or mold. In the Universe, apparently, there is no unidirectional development towards complexity; rather, on the contrary - the Universe is changing from space to chaos. The fact that man arose was a complete accident, an unpredictable mutation.

For many years in historical science, anthropology, and philosophy, the dominant point of view was that labor made man a man. Man rose above the animal state only when he began to produce tools, and this is his main difference from animals. However, this state of affairs now seems incorrect: primitive stone tools - axes, clubs - existed for almost a million years without undergoing significant changes; during this time, according to archaeological data, there was no significant improvement in the technique of cutting stones. Animals were much more successful in this; they turned out to be more skilled builders and inventors. Beaver dams, geometrically correct beehives, and termite mounds indicate that animals have progressed more significantly in this type of activity than humans. If technical skill could be a sufficient basis for determining intelligence, then, according to the famous American philosopher L. Mumford, a person would for a long time be considered as a hopeless loser. Thanks to an overdeveloped and constantly active brain, man from the very beginning possessed more mental energy than he needed to survive on a purely animal level. And it provided an outlet for this energy not only in obtaining food and reproduction, but also in the production of very strange, from the point of view of immediate needs, things: rock paintings, religious objects (totem poles, which were worshiped as spirits of the clan, prayer tablets, etc. .). “Cultural work” took on a more important position than utilitarian manual labor.

When excavating ancient human sites, archaeologists do not always find tools, but almost always - objects of religious worship or examples of primitive art. Man turned out to be not so much an animal that produced tools, but rather an animal that produced symbols - a symbolic animal. For example, a primitive family, before going hunting, ran around a totem pole three times and squatted five times. It was believed that after this the hunt would be successful. If an animal could think, it would decide that people behave like crazy people. But, from a person’s point of view, this was the most important symbolic action in which he introduced himself into a special state, created invisible, symbolic patrons for himself, i.e. performed purely human actions, developed his specific human nature. Perhaps this was the reason for the formation of human consciousness.

According to Lev Shestov, there are two hypotheses of the origin of man - biblical and Darwinian. The biblical fiction, he believed, was more plausible: this is evidenced by the unquenchable longing and eternal thirst of man) and his eternal inability to find what he needs on Earth. If a person descended from a monkey, he would be able to find what he needs like a monkey. But there are a lot of people in the world who have managed to adapt to life like monkeys. It only follows that both Darwin and the Bible are right. Some people descended from the sinful Adam, they feel the sin of their ancestors in their blood, they are tormented by it, while others - from the monkey who did not sin, their conscience is calm, they are not tormented and do not dream of excess.

F. Beggars believed that man had not yet arisen at all; for the most part he was still a super chimpanzee. It is “super”, because in comparison with a monkey he is smarter, more cunning, more dexterous, but still a monkey. Like the Russian thinkers, Nietzsche believed that Darwin's theory was not supported by any serious facts. Natural selection does promote survival, but not of the best and most significant individuals. As a result of natural selection, no progress occurs. Everything bright, beautiful, talented causes envy or even hatred and perishes - this is especially characteristic of society, but the same thing happens in nature. Only gray, nondescript individuals produce offspring. Brilliant people rarely have children. Bright people, strong and brave, always go forward, are not afraid to risk their lives, and therefore most often disappear from the stage of history.

The only representatives of true humanity, according to Nietzsche, are philosophers, artists and saints. Only they managed to escape from the animal world and live entirely by human interests. The distance between an ordinary person, a super chimpanzee and a monkey is much less than between him and a true person. Here qualitative differences are already observed, whereas in the first case only quantitative ones. But Nietzsche spoke about philosophers or artists, of course, not in a professional sense. According to Nietzsche, a philosopher is one who lives philosophically, ponders his life, foresees the consequences of all his actions, chooses his own path in life, without looking back at standards and stereotypes. Likewise, an artist is not only an artist or a writer, he is a person who, whatever he does, does it masterfully, everything turns out well and beautifully. Well, a saint is, by definition, a person who has completely gotten rid of passions, greed, selfishness, and is full of love and compassion for any person.

Unfortunately, most people are too human, too grounded, too immersed in their petty affairs and worries, while they should, according to Nietzsche, strive for the superhuman, for those superhuman (meaning not animal) qualities. which philosophers or saints possess. Such people most often look like fragments of the most valuable artistic sketches, where everything cries out: come, help, complete, connect! It is as if they have not yet occurred and exist as true people only potentially.

But how can the life of an individual have the highest value and deepest meaning? Under what conditions is it least wasted? It is necessary, Nietzsche believed, for a person to look at himself as a failed work of nature, but at the same time as evidence of the greatest intentions of this artist. Everyone must tell themselves: this time she didn’t succeed, but I will try to make sure that someday she succeeds. I will work to develop myself into a philosopher, an artist, or a saint.

THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN GENESIS

We approach man with four different dimensions: biological, mental, social and cosmic. Biological is expressed in anatomical, physiological, genetic phenomena. as well as in the neuro-brain, electrochemical and some other processes of the human body. The mental is understood as the inner mental and spiritual world of a person - his conscious and unconscious processes, will. experiences, memory, character, temperament, etc. But not a single dimension separately reveals the phenomenon of man in its entirety. Man, we say, is a rational being. What, then, is his thinking: does it obey only biological laws or only social ones? Any categorical answer would be an obvious simplification: human thinking is a complexly organized biopsychosocial phenomenon, the material substrate of which, of course, is amenable to biological measurement (more precisely, physiological), but its content, specific fullness, is already an unconditional intertwining of the mental and the social, and such, in in which the social, being mediated by the emotional-intellectual-volitional sphere, acts as a mental one.

The social and biological, existing in an indivisible unity in man, in abstraction capture only the extreme poles in the diversity of human properties and actions. So, if we go to the biological pole in the analysis of a person, we will “descend” to the level of existence of his organismal (biophysical, physiological) laws, oriented towards the self-regulation of material-energy processes as a stable dynamic system striving to preserve its integrity.

Psychological science provides rich experimental material indicating that only in the conditions of a normal human society is the existence and development of a normal human psyche possible and that, on the contrary, the lack of communication and isolation of the individual lead to disturbances in the state of his consciousness, as well as the emotional-volitional sphere. Thus, the idea of a person presupposes another person or, more precisely, other people.

A child is born with all the anatomical and physiological wealth accumulated by humanity over the past millennia. But a child who has not absorbed the culture of society turns out to be the most unadapted to life of all living beings. There are known cases when, due to unfortunate circumstances, very young children ended up with animals. And what? They did not master either a straight gait or articulate speech, and the sounds they uttered were similar to the sounds of the animals among which they lived. Their thinking turned out to be so primitive that one can speak about it only with a certain degree of convention. This is a clear example of the fact that man, in the proper sense of the word, is a social being.

A person can be free only in a free society. It is free where it not only serves as a means for achieving social goals, but also acts as an end in itself for societies. Only a highly organized society will create conditions for the formation of an active, comprehensive, self-motivated personality and will make precisely these qualities the measure of assessing a person’s dignity. It is a highly organized society that needs such individuals. In the process of creating such a society, people develop a sense of self-worth.

Without claiming the status of a definition, we briefly summarize the essential features of a person. Man is an embodied spirit and spiritualized corporeality, a spiritual-material being with intelligence. And at the same time, it is a subject of labor, social relations and communication through articulate speech. With his organismic level he is included in the natural connection of phenomena and is subject to natural necessity, and with his personal level he is turned to social existence, to society, to the history of mankind, to culture. The life of a person outside of society is as impossible as the life of a plant pulled out of the ground and thrown onto dry sand.

A person, as any philosophy or religion testifies, has two lives: one in which we live, like wound-up machines, adapting to the world and society around us; and the second, into which we fall in rare moments or days of our existence, when we create, love, do good. From the point of view of philosophy, the latter is the true life: here we rejoice, worry, deeply experience, here we live completely in a waking state. However, all these things: goodness, love, beauty, intelligence, conscience, honor - are supernatural because they do not have any natural causes.

You cannot ask a person why he did good (for if there is a reason, then there is no good deed: “I saved the person because he is rich and will thank me”), you cannot ask why, for what reason he loves another person (for if there is a reason, then there is no love: “I love her because she is beautiful,” but there are thousands more beautiful). Good, like love, does not need explanation, but evil needs explanation; any of our bad deeds must be explained and justified. We are always looking for reasons only for dishonor, for treason, for evil. But if we often commit evil deeds automatically (just as only stupidity automatically comes to mind, and for a smart thought to come, we have to try hard), then goodness, honor, love, intelligence do not happen on their own, are not accomplished automatically mode. As the philosopher M.K. wrote Mamardashvili, all these things live to the extent that they are renewed by human effort, they live only on the wave of this effort. In general, nothing human can exist on its own, but must be constantly renewed. Even a law cannot be established and then forgotten and hoped that it can work. In fact, its effect rests entirely on the existence of a sufficiently large number of people who understand it, need it as an integral element of their existence and are ready to die in order for the law to exist. There will be no freedom if there are no people who need it and who are ready to fight for it. A person himself does not exist as some kind of given, as an object, like a table or a chair; a person does not exist at all as something unchangeable, permanent, present; a person is the desire to be a person. No aspiration - no person.

At the same time, in a person, even in a different, intense mode of existence - in love, creativity, natural processes do not stop; he himself continues to live in this world, to do ordinary and everyday things. And in this sense, a person is “stretched,” as Mamardashvili puts it, between two worlds. This elongation presupposes tension, and it is obvious that if there is a person, then there is some tense holding in oneself of two worlds, tense holding, being a natural being, something unnatural, artificial, resting on very fragile foundations. Fragile because the artificial foundations of man are never fully realized in this natural world: in it there is no conscience, no goodness, no beauty in its pure form. And yet, a person’s entire life is associated with these foundations. But to be absolutely good is an endless task, just as to be absolutely wise is an endless task. But man is finite. His life is not enough to achieve these perfections, and yet he strives for it. To strive for what life is not enough for is human destiny. This desire is what can be called the immortal soul.

The purpose of a person is to leave his mark, so that his deeds and thoughts become a necessary part of this world. For me this is only possible if I live my life. Because in our world everything has already been said, everything has been done, everything has been written, in this world there is no place for the mind, all that remains is to repeat what has already happened, as most people do, without fulfilling their purpose. Living my life means finding the place that is left for me. I have to understand everything myself, as if no one understood it before me. My future relationships with the world depend on how I understand what I saw or learned. There is no knowledge at all, abstract knowledge, it must always be understood, the progress of knowledge is that another has understood differently. When I try to understand, to find my unique position, my place, then I begin to live my life and at the same time the life of the world. We can say that in this case the world understands itself. This happens when I break out of the vicious circle of other people's knowledge, stereotypes, prejudices, when I move apart the stuck together blocks of the world in order to take my place, which can only be occupied by my own understanding; in this sense, my understanding is a necessary component of me.

Special mention must be made of those concepts in which, despite all the external recognition of the importance of the biological factor, unjustifiably optimistic statements are made about the possibility of a rapid and irreversible change in human nature in the right direction due to external educational influences alone. History knows many examples of how social psychology was changed with the help of powerful social levers (even to the point of mass psychosis), but these processes were always short-lived and, most importantly, reversible. After a temporary frenzy, a person always returns to his original state, and sometimes even loses the achieved milestones. Reformist storming and short-term exhausting jerks have no historical and social meaning - they only disorient the will and violate the logic of natural development.

How does a person combine his biological and social principles? A person is born as a biosocial unity. But he is born with incompletely formed anatomical and physiological systems, which are further formed in the conditions of society. The mechanism of heredity, which determines the biological side of a person, also includes his social essence. A newborn is a tabula rasa, on which the environment “draws” its bizarre patterns. Heredity provides the child not only with purely biological properties and instincts. He initially turns out to have the ability to imitate and communicate. Thus, the child is born precisely as a human being. And yet, from the moment of birth, he still needs to learn to become a person. He is introduced into the world of people by communication with them; it is this that shapes his psyche, morality, culture, and social behavior.

Every healthy person has fingers obedient to his will; he can take a brush, paints and start painting. But this will not make him a real painter. It's the same with consciousness. Conscious mental phenomena are formed during life as a result of upbringing, training, active mastery of language, and the world of culture.

So, a person is an integral unity of biological (organismal), mental and social levels, which are formed from two sources - natural and social, hereditary and acquired during life. Moreover, the human individual is not a simple arithmetic sum of the biological, mental and social, but their integral unity, leading to the emergence of a new qualitative stage - the human personality.

The entire spiritual make-up of a person bears the clear stamp of social existence. Indeed, his practical actions are an individual expression of the historically established social practice of humanity. The tools that a person uses perform a function developed by society that predetermines

methods of their application. Each person, when starting a task, takes into account what has already been done. Everything that he possesses that differs from animals is the result of his life in society.

The richness and complexity of the social content of a person are determined by the diversity of his connections with the social whole and with its parts, down to the atomic, with the degree of accumulation and refraction in his consciousness and activities of various spheres of social life. That is why the level of personal development is an indicator of the level of development of society and vice versa. However, the individual does not dissolve in society. It retains the value of unique and independent individuality and contributes to the whole.

People in one country, one society live in more or less the same conditions - in the same culture, the same morals and customs, the same language, but people are still all different, different from each other. Even in the same family, children grow up different, although they are raised in the same conditions.

What makes all people different, different and unique? Firstly, the characteristics of the mental makeup: temperament, speed of mental reactions, intelligence. All this is inherited by a person.

Secondly, childhood experiences and memories of childhood. Each person has his own childhood experience, his own experiences, the world opened up to each in his own way, each experienced childhood fears, failures or joys in his own way. Childhood experiences leave an imprint on a person’s entire future life. Perhaps all our talents and abilities lie in parental (primarily maternal) love. A child who feels this love from childhood lives in an atmosphere of love and is protected from adversity and misfortune all his life. As a rule, everything works out for him in life, he is talented or has many extraordinary abilities. On the contrary, someone who grew up without love, in a cold and harsh atmosphere of indifference, feels lonely all his life, even if he is surrounded by family or relatives, everything in his life is difficult and difficult. Childhood memories accompany a person until death, and over the years, interestingly, they not only do not fade, but become brighter. Old people have difficulty remembering what happened to them yesterday, but they remember their childhood from the earliest days to the smallest detail.

Thirdly, the features of an individual biography: everyone lives their own life, and everything that happens to them, and the way they relate to it, is completely different from the lives of other people.

Fourthly, the inconsistency of life roles. Everyone in life simultaneously has several roles that they “play.” For example, a student, when talking with teachers, and especially with the rector, is one person, attentive, respectful, his eyes shine with knowledge and diligence. But as soon as he goes outside, where his friends are waiting for him, he is completely different. He becomes the third person at home, with his parents. This does not mean that he is pretending every time - a person has many faces, or rather, many sides of his personality, many roles. Often these roles even contradict each other and nevertheless form a single complex of his personality, completely unique.

All these four points make each person as an individual unique and unrepeatable. And this uniqueness is expressed in the concept of “I.” A person’s “I” appears from the age of three or four, when he begins to understand that there is “I,” and there are other people. Before this, almost all children talk about themselves in the third person. By the ages of 10-12, an image of the Self is formed. Each person has an image of himself, a sum of ideas about himself, how he sees himself, and a person carries this image throughout his life, correcting and supplementing it a little. This is, as a rule, a rather nice image - every normal person considers himself more or less interesting, smart, capable, honest, kind, etc.

The most terrible tragedy of human life is the disintegration of the image when a person

becomes convinced and agrees that he is not kind, not smart, that he is, for example, a fool or a scoundrel. As a rule, life after this seems over, in this case the person may even kill himself.

There are self-defense mechanisms that operate unconsciously, preserving the personality from destruction. For example:

Displacement mechanism. A person experiences great grief if he is faced with something so terrible that his psyche may not be able to withstand and collapse, a mechanism is triggered, and the person either loses consciousness or suddenly forgets about the misfortune that befell him;

An inversion mechanism that reverses the impulse to the exact opposite. So, boys at the age of 12-13 awaken their sexual feelings, they begin to like girls, but the child cannot realize this, the psyche can be traumatized, and it turns all relationships upside down, boys begin to consider girls their first enemies, they fight, push, knock out the briefcase from hands

Reorientation mechanism. The psyche unconsciously switches emotions from one object to another, more accessible one.. A schoolchild has big troubles in class, and, coming home upset, he takes out his irritation on his younger brother or on his beloved dog, so, in some countries, on the advice of psychologists in every workshop at the factory they set up a room in which there are stuffed animals of the foreman, the head of the workshop: you can take out your irritation on them.

And the psyche has a whole host of mechanisms that protect its integrity and harmony, so that a person does not feel at odds with the world and others.

We can say that a person has two selves - external and internal. The external self meets people, studies at university, gains knowledge, does some things and performs actions. The external self is a body of knowledge, rules of action, behavior, and methods of thinking. The inner self is the intimate, hidden core of personality, it is all our dreams and hopes, memories of first love and first spring, our passions, desires that we hide deep in our souls. This is something that cannot be told to another, conveyed in the form of words or signs. A person often does not know what is inherent in him. R. Descartes said that the one who can tell everything about himself will describe the entire Universe. But try to tell me. For a mere mortal this is an impossible thing. This requires talent. Any novel, any painting or symphony is the artist’s story about himself. The inner self is what makes us a person; without it we are only thinking machines.

Scientists and philosophers have long noticed that each person belongs primarily to some type of personality, and all people can be divided, of course, very conditionally, into different types. For example, it has been noticed that any person, before answering any important question, will first look either to the left or to the right and then answer. Therefore, everyone. people can be divided according to this criterion - into those who look to the left before answering, and into those who look to the right. But this, of course, is a joke.

The first serious attempt to classify personalities was made by the Greek physician Claudius Galen, who lived in the 2nd century. AD Studying human characters, he came to the conclusion that according to their temperament, all people are divided into four types: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. Any person can be classified as one or the other type. A choleric person is an easily excitable, nervous person who is acutely worried about everything that happens to him. A melancholic person is always sad, gloomy, and believes that the world is unfair to him. A typical melancholic person is the donkey Eeyore. A phlegmatic person is a person indifferent to everything that happens around him, self-absorbed, apathetic, like an ancient stoic, and does not believe in anything good. Sanguine is the most balanced mental type. Everything in it is proportionate - sadness, joy, apathy, and melancholy. Of course, in their pure form there are neither phlegmatics nor melancholics), but predominantly any person gravitates towards one type.

An equally interesting example of personality classification is given by the American psychologist L. Sheldon. He divides all people into three types: cerebral (cerebrotonic), muscular (somatic) and gastric (visceratonic). The brain type is a person who lives exclusively with his head and intellect. As a child, he is a frail, physically undeveloped child, an excellent student at school, always solving some puzzling problems, withdrawn, shy, but proud of his achievements.

For the muscular type, the main thing is his body. He plays sports all the time, trains, studies poorly, copies problems from a brainy friend and patronizes him for this. Finally, for the gastric type, the main thing is food. He constantly thinks about food, he has pies or sandwiches and greasy notebooks in his briefcase. As an adult, he prepares food himself and does not trust his wife. He is a gourmet and knows thousands of recipes for preparing all kinds of dishes. Each person in himself or in his friends can see a tendency towards one type or another.

The Russian physiologist I. Pavlov divided all people into two types: scientific and artistic. The first is a closed, uncommunicative, self-absorbed person who finds it difficult to meet new people. The artistic type is the complete opposite of the scientific type: lively, sociable, bright, emotional, he is a friend to everyone, and everyone is his friend. The first type is most often found among scientists, and the second among artists, although in any person, no matter what he does, one can find traits of one or the other type. But in general, this is also a rather poor and simplified division.

A more serious and detailed justification for dividing people into different psychological types was given by the famous Swiss psychiatrist K. Jung. One of his books is called “Psychological Types.” All people, according to Jung, are divided into two groups: extroverts and introverts. Moreover, this difference arises very early, so early that it may be hereditary. An extrovert is a person oriented outward, into the world; he is an open type; An introvert is oriented inward, this is a type of closed, closed person. An extroverted child adapts to the environment very early; he is not afraid of any things or objects, loves to play with them and thanks to this he learns quickly. He is characterized by fearlessness, a tendency to take risks, and is attracted to everything unknown and unknown. At the same time, he himself does not think seriously about anything and does not like loneliness. An extrovert is characterized by responsiveness and interest in all external events: someone is shouting in the yard or there is a war going on somewhere in the world - he is completely absorbed in this. He is able to endure turmoil and noise of any kind because he finds pleasure in it. He always wants to be the center of attention and even agrees to pretend to be a jester, at whom the whole class laughs, just so as not to remain in the shadows. He makes a lot of friends and acquaintances indiscriminately. Always likes to be around some famous person to show off himself. He has no secrets; he cannot keep them for long, since he shares everything with others. He lives in others and for others and is afraid of any reflection on himself.

Since childhood, an introvert has been thoughtful, shy, afraid of everything unknown, and usually perceives external influences with strong resistance. An introverted child wants to do everything his own way and does not obey rules that he cannot understand. His real world is internal. He keeps aloof from external events, he feels uneasy when he finds himself among many people, and in large companies he feels lonely and lost. Such a person usually looks awkward, clumsy, and is often deliberately reserved. Because he is grimly inaccessible, he is often resented. There are few rosy colors in his picture of the world, he is hypercritical and will find a hair in any soup. For him, it is a real pleasure to think about himself. His own world is a safe haven, a carefully tended and fenced garden, closed to the public and hidden from prying eyes. Nevertheless, he often achieves great success in science if he can overcome his complexes.

Philosophers have always been faced with the impossibility of defining a person, although there have always been attempts to give one. “Reasonable man” (homo sapiens), “doing man” (homo faber), “playing man” (homo ludens), Marx spoke of man as an animal producing tools, Hegel - as a mammal, Nietzsche believed that man - this is an animal) that knows how to promise, etc. and so on.

Apparently, a person cannot be defined unambiguously and definitively; he is too multifaceted, versatile in his thoughts, deeds and accomplishments, and none of his many properties is the main thing, decisive for his understanding. It can only be defined through qualities that carry negation, irreducibility, uncertainty, irreplaceability, uniqueness, inexpressibility. These five properties testify not to the limitations or inferiority of human nature, but to its exceptional character, the special place of man among other objects or phenomena of the surrounding world.

THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

The first approach is most characterized by a religious interpretation of life. The only thing that makes life meaningful and therefore has absolute meaning for a person is nothing other than effective participation in the Theanthropic life. This is exactly how Christ answered the question of what to do?: “This is the work of God, so that they do not believe in Him Whom He sent.” Not remaking the world on the principles of good, but cultivating substantial good in oneself, the effort of life with Christ and in Christ. God created man in his own image and likeness, and we must demonstrate it with our lives. The empirical life of the world is meaningless, just as scraps of pages torn from a book are incoherent (S. L. Frank).

The second approach is based on a secularized religious idea. Man is capable of reorganizing the world on the principles of goodness and justice. The movement towards this bright future is a network of progress. Progress, then, presupposes a goal, and a goal gives meaning to human life. Critics have long noted that this approach idolizes the future at the expense of the present and the past. Progress turns every human generation, every person, every era into a means and instrument for the final goal - the perfection, power and bliss of the future humanity, in which none of us “will have a share” (Berdyaev).

According to the third approach, life has no meaning stemming from the past or future, much less from the other world. In life itself there is no once and for all given, once defined meaning. Only we ourselves, consciously or spontaneously, intentionally or involuntarily, by the very ways of our being, give it meaning and, thereby, choose and create our human essence.

Death is the most important factor in human existence. Only by looking into the face of death do we begin to love life. If there were no death, life would be meaningless. In ancient Greek mythology, the most terrible punishment to which the gods could sentence a person was immortality. What could be more terrible than immortality, although in thousands of books, novels, and treatises immortality was presented as the main dream of humanity. Imagine that you are immortal: all your relatives and friends, children and your children’s children have already died, and you still live and live, absolutely alone and abandoned in a time and culture that is alien to you and incomprehensible to you.

Death implies the highest level of responsibility. To deprive a person of death means, among other things, to remove this level of responsibility. Man, being a finite being, differs from all animals in that he applies the scale of the unconditional and infinite to his finitude. He should live, says philosophy, as if eternity lay ahead of him, only not in the ordinary sense, when a person simply does not think about death, but in the sense that he has taken and will take on tasks for which he is obviously not Your own life is enough. In this sense, by creating, loving, doing good, he breaks through into eternity and defeats death.

Many who took on such endless tasks remained to live in eternity, in the literal sense of the word. Socrates, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Pushkin are much more alive than many of our living contemporaries. The words of V. Solovyov can be attributed to any of them:

Among the random bustle,

In the muddy stream of life's anxieties,

You possess a joyful secret: “Evil is powerless.” We are eternal. God is with us.

In conclusion, it should be said that, despite all its importance, the question of the meaning of life and, even more so, of its construction according to the principle “To make life from whom? From Comrade Dzerzhinsky” should not be absolutized, because it is capable of enslaving a person with the help of general ideas, replacing the “drama of life” with the “logic of life” introduced into this life from the outside.

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

1. Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary M., 1998

2. "Philosophy". Textbook for universities. Rostov-on-Don. "Phoenix" 1998.

3. “Philosophy” Educational pos. M., 2002.

4. “Philosophy” Textbook, ed. V.G. Kuznetsova et al. M., 1999.

5. “Philosophy” Teaching. village edited by Gubina V.D., M., 2000.

6. A.G. Spirkin “Philosophy” Uch. village M., “Gardarika” 2002

7. “Philosophy” Teaching. village M., "Spark" 2002.

"Philosophy". Textbook for universities. Rostov-on-Don. "Phoenix" 1998., p.212

"Philosophy" Educational pos. M., 2002., p.481

A.G. Spirkin “Philosophy” Uch. village M., “Gardarika” 2002., p. 118

"Philosophy" Educational pos. M., 2002., p.470

"Philosophy" Educational pos. M., 2002., p.482

"Philosophy" Academic. village edited by Gubina V.D., M., 2000, p.200

“Philosophy” Textbook, ed. V.G. Kuznetsova et al. M., 1999., p. 112

"Philosophy" Educational pos. M., 2002., p.476

"Philosophy". Textbook for universities. Rostov-on-Don. "Phoenix" 1998., p.239

At all times, man has strived to understand his “I,” the purpose and meaning of life. Pushkin and Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky tried to solve the eternal problems of human existence. M. Gorky was no exception, but he developed his own understanding of man and his life purpose, which differed from the philosophical concepts of his predecessors. In this regard, Gorky’s play “At the Depths” is indicative.

This work is an indictment of society, which throws people to the “bottom of life”, depriving them of honor and dignity, eradicating high human feelings. But even here, “at the bottom,” the power of the “masters of life” continues, represented in the play by the sinister figures of the hostel owners. World drama has never known such a harsh, merciless truth about the life of the lower social classes, about their hopeless fate.

Under the gloomy, dark arches of the Kostylevo flophouse there are people with different characters, people from different social strata. In one room there are old and young, single and married, men and women, healthy and sick, hungry and well-fed. Overcrowding and terrible poverty give rise to mutual irritation, quarrels, fights and even murder. People, thrown back to a cave existence, become brutal, lose their human appearance, shame and conscience, and trample on moral standards.

The Kostylevs’ shelter resembles a prison; it’s not for nothing that its inhabitants sing the prison song “The Sun Rises and Sets.” Those who end up in their basement belong to different social strata, but everyone has the same fate - no one manages to get out of it. Locksmith Kleshch considers the shelter to be only a temporary shelter, hoping that hard, honest work will save him. At first, he even treats the night shelters with contempt, opposing himself to them: “I am a working man... I’m ashamed to look at them... I’ve been working since I was little... do you think I won’t get out of here? I’ll get out... I’ll rip off my skin, but I’ll get out.” But Kleshch's dreams do not come true. Soon he is forced to become an ordinary slum dweller.

For most of the night shelters, the best is in the past: for the Baron it is a prosperous life, for the Actor it is creative work. However, as the former telegraph operator, and now a sharper, Satin, says, “you won’t go anywhere in the carriage of the past.”

Gorky does not introduce readers to the life history of his characters; the play talks about it briefly. The present for the residents of the shelter is terrible, and they have no future at all. The past has left an indelible imprint on their personality.

But “At the Bottom” is not an everyday play, but a socio-philosophical play, based on an ideological conflict. It contrasts different views on man, on the truth and lies of life, on imaginary and genuine humanism. Almost all overnight residents take part in the discussion of these big issues to some extent. Gorky's drama is characterized by dialogue-disputes that reveal the social, philosophical and aesthetic positions of the characters. Verbal duels are also typical for the heroes of this play.

Many generally accepted truths are rejected by social outcasts. It is worth, for example, Kleshch to say that the night shelters live without honor and conscience, as Bubnov will answer him: “What is conscience for? I’m not rich,” and Vaska Ash will quote Satin’s words: “Every person wants his neighbor to have a conscience, but, you see, it’s not beneficial for anyone to have one.”

Disputes about man continue between the inhabitants of the shelter throughout the play, but they intensify in connection with the disappearance of the wanderer Luke. The assessment of Luka’s personality and his role in the life of the night shelters is ambiguous. On the one hand: “He was a good old man!” (Nastya); “He was compassionate” (Kleshch); “The old man was good... he had a law for his soul!.. Don’t offend a person - that’s the law” (Tatar); “Man is the truth... He understood this...” (Satin). On the other hand: "Old Charlatan" (Baron); “He... didn’t like the truth, old man...” (Mite), etc.

Both of these points of view are correct. The essence of Luke's position is revealed in two parables. The first is the wanderer’s story about how he took pity on two robbers who were plotting murder, fed and warmed them, that is, he responded to evil with good. The parable of the “righteous land” raises the question of what is more important for a person - truth or hope. Luke believes that, albeit false, there is hope.

“I lied out of pity for you,” Satin says about the hero. This lie gave people the strength to live, resist fate and hope for the best. When the deception was revealed, real life horrified the Actor - and he hanged himself, Nastya fell into despair, Vaska Ash went to prison at the first attempt to change his fate.

Thus, Luke's philosophy includes Christian long-suffering, sensitivity to the suffering of others, and sober realism. This is one of the points of view in a dispute about a person - “a white lie.” Weak, impressionable people believe in it, just as they believe in “golden dreams.” This is Actor, Ash, Nastya. Those who find support in themselves do not need either pity or soothing lies.

Bubnov has a different view of a person. He confesses the truth of the fact: you should not try to change something, you need to come to terms with evil and go with the flow. The most crushing blow to the philosophy of Luke and Bubnov is dealt by Satin, who, however, will also not go further than his words about an all-powerful man, a Man with a capital M, but it is he who expresses the idea that the salvation of man lies in him.

Each of the last three acts of the play ends with the death of Anna, Kostylev, and Actor. These events attest not only to the moral and everyday foundations of “traglessness.” The philosophical subtext is important here. At the end of the second act, Satin shouts: “The dead do not hear!” Dead people don’t feel... Scream... roar... Dead people don’t hear!” Vegetation in a shelter is not much different from death. The “tramps” living here are as deaf and blind as dust buried in the earth. The movement of Gorky’s drama is associated with the awakening of “living corpses,” their hearing, and emotions. In the fourth act, complex processes take place in the sleepy soul, and people begin to hear, feel, and understand something. The “acid” of sad thoughts is purified, like an “old, dirty coin”, Satin’s thought is tempered.

This is where the main meaning of the play's ending lies. According to the author, only a person’s faith in his own strength and his courage can change the world around him.

The ending of the play is ambiguous. Having put forward the idea of a strong personality in Satin’s monologue, the author helps the characters feel something, understand something, realize something. But the answer to the author’s question: “What is better: truth or compassion?” - not in the play.

Ministry of General and Vocational Education

Volga Region Academy of Public Administration

Man as a philosophical

problem

(abstract)

Department of Constitutional Law Completed by: applicant Strelnikov

Vladilen Vladimirovich

Saratov 2002

Content

Introduction

Human nature and the nature of the philosophical concept

The Essence of Human Genesis

The meaning of human existence

List of used literature

INTRODUCTION

HUMAN NATURE AND THE CHARACTER OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT

THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN GENESIS

The social and biological, existing in an indivisible unity in man, in abstraction capture only the extreme poles in the diversity of human properties and actions. Thus, if we go to the biological pole in the analysis of a person, we will “descend” to the level of existence of his organismal (biophysical, physiological) laws, oriented towards the self-regulation of material-energy processes as a stable dynamic system striving to preserve its integrity1.

What makes all people different, different and unique? Firstly, the characteristics of the mental makeup: temperament, speed of mental reactions, intelligence. All this is inherited by a person.

The most terrible tragedy of human life is the disintegration of the image when a person

becomes convinced and agrees that he is not kind, not smart, that he is, for example, a fool or a scoundrel. As a rule, life after this seems over, in this case the person may even kill himself.

There are self-defense mechanisms that operate unconsciously, preserving the personality from destruction. For example:

And the psyche has a whole host of mechanisms that protect its integrity and harmony, so that a person does not feel at odds with the world and others.

THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

The question about the meaning of life is a question about the purpose of man. Not why?, but what does a person live for? It has occupied man since time immemorial. There is, writes the famous French moralist and philosopher Albert Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” only one fundamental question of philosophy. It is a question of whether life is or is not worth living. Everything else - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories - is secondary. The very organization of this interrogation indicates that it is born out of doubt about the existence of such a meaning. Doubt suggests that reality itself may be disjointed, inconsistent and absurd.

The problem, then, as Camus put it, is “is there a logic that is acceptable even to death?” Among the many approaches to solving this complex problem, three main ones can be distinguished: the meaning of life is initially inherent in life in its deepest foundations; the meaning of life beyond life; The meaning of life is created by the subject himself. All three approaches are characterized by the idea that life, as it actually is, is meaningless according to the formula of Ecclesiastes: “All is vanity!”, but the very understanding of the meaning of life varies1.

Among the random bustle,

In the muddy stream of life's anxieties,

You possess a joyful secret: “Evil is powerless.” We are eternal. God is with us.

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

1. Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary M., 1998

2. "Philosophy". Textbook for universities. Rostov-on-Don. "Phoenix" 1998.

3. “Philosophy” Educational pos. M., 2002.

4. “Philosophy” Textbook, ed. V.G. Kuznetsova et al. M., 1999.

5. “Philosophy” Teaching. village edited by Gubina V.D., M., 2000.

6. A.G. Spirkin “Philosophy” Uch. village M., “Gardarika” 2002

7. “Philosophy” Teaching. village M., "Spark" 2002.

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... (“Stages of the organic and man”, 1928), A. Gehlen (“Man. His nature and his position in the world”, 1940), M. Landman, carrying out mainly organic, bioanthropological approaches to the problem of man, came to leading to a significant limitation of the horizon of philosophical anthropological thinking. They elevated biological,...

For all abomination, and so that you, leaning on him, can refrain from evil and become a conductor of its undoubted truth.” This is the connection of humanity through the “corporality of the Divine” with the absolute. Walking everywhere, doing everything with Christ in you is the way to improve humanity, the solution to the problem of man in Solovyov’s philosophy. This is how he sees the path to God-manhood. Such a life in eternal striving

The term "philosophical anthropology". But this term also has another, broader meaning. It denotes a section of philosophical knowledge devoted to a comprehensive consideration of the problem of man. “Philosophical anthropology is a branch of philosophy in which man is studied as a special kind of being, the problems of human nature and human existence are comprehended, and the modes of the human are analyzed...

In general, or during the formation of moral, religious, political and other aspects of individual consciousness. In the context of the indicated logic of philosophical research, the corresponding place and understanding will be occupied by the problem of human freedom, the problem of the relationship between man and society, the development of consciousness, etc. The main thing that needs to be fixed now is that the whole scheme of philosophizing according to...