What is life philosophy. Philosophy of life: general characteristics and main provisions

The philosophy of life is one of the eternal questions that humanity has been asking since its inception. Why do we live? Why? Is there any meaning in our life? Philosophy in the life of a person, even the most rational, always occupies a separate place. You probably know the state when, willy-nilly, you begin to think about the eternal. About values and priorities in life, about what role you play or can play in the lives of other people, about what will happen to you after death, etc. These are all complex, multifaceted questions, the answers to which change over time. Our article is devoted to the problems of life in philosophy, its meaning, as well as the search for an answer to the question: "What is death: a real event after which everything ends, or a moment of transition to another reality in which everything will continue?".

The essence of the philosophy of life

The essence of the philosophy of life tried to formulate thinkers, philosophers, scientists - the great minds of the whole world of all times. Traditional philosophy emphasizes that the most important thing for a person should be knowledge, science, and the development of the mind. The problem of life in philosophy arose at the end of the 19th century against the backdrop of constant wars and the deaths, losses, and destruction associated with them. It has become important for people to understand whether death is so terrible, what happens after it, and what is the point of living if it certainly ends in death? What is the result of human life? Does he exist?

Representatives of the philosophy of life (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Dilthey, G. Simmel, O. Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, Scheler, A. Toynbee, L. N. Gumilyov, E. Crick) believed that the real task for every person living on earth is the comprehension of life as a dynamically developing reality. That is, it is not the result of life that is important, not what a person will achieve, not what he will learn, not how much money he will earn. No! The only important thing is that a person living his life perceives it as a path that has no end. You need to go this way, enjoying every moment, rejoicing in every person you meet, because in the end, no one knows what is there after death? This is a matter of faith, not philosophy.

When it comes to the philosophy of life, for every person who is at least slightly familiar with philosophy, the concept of Nietzsche's philosophy of life mechanically arises in the mind. It is this thinker who is considered the founder of the philosophy of life. His vision of the meaning of life is to know life irrationally, i.e. without the aid of reason. Much more accurate Nietzsche considered intuition, premonitions, irrational thinking. Nietzsche believed that man is not the final form of life, that there must be a so-called "superman", which is higher than good and evil. He is driven by other, hitherto unknown moral values. In the superman, only strength and power are important. Of course, Nietzsche is cruel in his philosophy, because he rejects such concepts as morality, justice and religion, considering them manifestations of the psychology of slaves. The history of mankind, however, proved that Nietzsche was wrong in his reasoning. Without morality, history, justice, as well as moral principles, everything loses its meaning. Man not only does not become a superman, but even acquires an animal form.

Ultimately, each person chooses the essence of the philosophy of life for himself, and what is right for one may be completely unacceptable for another. The most important judge for us is time, it will put everything in its place and show who was right and who was wrong.

Life and death in philosophy

Life and death in philosophy, along with the search for the meaning of life, also play a very important role. Religion, culture, and politics talk about life and death. In some way, the problem of the meaning of life in philosophy is so acute against the background of the obligatory onset of death. In search of an answer to the question: "What is the meaning of life?" philosophy and religion give us a lot of answers. But at the same time, it seems that none of the explanations of life will become convincing until a person understands the meaning of death.

Death and immortality is the most difficult riddle, because all life's affairs are commensurate with the eternal. A person, one way or another, thinks about death, unlike an animal. In a way, death is the price of evolution. Unicellular organisms are practically immortal. In a multicellular organism, a mechanism of self-destruction appears at a certain stage of development. Any living being dies after completing its mission. The most important thing in achieving immortality is the spiritual life, the philosophy of which is the constant development of one's spirit, for only it is eternal, the body is only its temporary refuge.

The life of any person is initially aimed at self-improvement, at the fulfillment of one's destiny. Think about it, do you really think that, having appeared as a result of a confluence of millions of circumstances, as a result of a long evolution, the meaning of your life lies in tedious work, watching TV and other useless nonsense? No! You are a person, a being endowed with reason, a being in which the whole Universe coexists. The meaning of life is to make the world better, brighter, kinder, so that those who come after you will remember you with gratitude. And then it does not matter at all whether death actually exists or not. Or maybe death is just a transition to another world, which, just like this one, is waiting for you, requiring your participation and help? And so on ad infinitum...

Philosophy of life: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

The irrationalist trend that developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its emergence was associated with the rapid development of biology, psychology and other sciences, which revealed the failure of the mechanistic picture of the world. At the center of this philosophy lies the concept of life as an absolute, infinite, unique beginning of the world, which, unlike matter and consciousness, is actively, diversely, eternally moving.

Arthur Schopenhauer - German idealist philosopher; earned himself fame as a brilliant essayist. He considered himself a follower of Kant. When interpreting his philosophical views, the main emphasis was placed on the doctrine of a priori forms of sensibility to the detriment of the doctrine of the categorical structure of thinking. He singled out two aspects of understanding the subject: the one that is given as an object of perception, and the one that is the subject in itself. The world as a representation is entirely conditioned by the subject and is a sphere of visibility.

Schopenhauer is a supporter of voluntarism. Will in his teaching appears as a cosmic principle underlying the universe. Will, being a dark and mysterious force, is extremely egocentric, which means for each individual an eternal desire, anxiety, conflicts with other people.

The aesthetic ideal of Schopenhauer is in Buddhist nirvana, in the killing of the "will to live", in complete asceticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher, one of the founders of modern irrationalism in the form of a philosophy of life. His views have undergone a certain evolution from a romantic esthesia of the experience of culture through a "reassessment of all values" and a critique of "European nihilism" to a comprehensive concept of voluntarism.

The main provisions of the mature philosophy of Nietzsche are:

everything that exists is the will to power, power;

the world itself is a multitude of warring pictures of the world, or perspectives emanating from centers of power - perspectivism.

Nietzsche is a resolute opponent of the opposition of the "true world" accelerated in European culture to the empiric world, the origins of which he sees in the denial of life, in decadence. Nietzsche connects the critique of metaphysics with the critique of language. The deep internal inconsistency of Nietzsche's vitalism is manifested in the question of the relationship between the truth of this or that doctrine, idea, concept, etc. and their historical genesis. Major works: "Human, too human", "Merry Science", "Beyond Good", "Antichristian".

THE PROBLEM OF BEING IN A. SCHOPENHAUER, F. NIETZSCHE, A. BERGSON, K. MARX

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). One of the brightest figures of irrationalism is Arthur Schopenhauer, who was dissatisfied with Hegel's optimistic rationalism and dialectics.

The basis of the world, according to Schopenhauer, is the will, which subjugates the intellect.

How strong the will is stronger than the intellect, according to Schopenhauer, can be judged by one's own actions, because almost all of them are dictated not by the arguments of the mind, but by instincts and desires. The strongest instinct in life is sexual love, that is, procreation, but in fact - the reproduction of new generations for suffering, torment and inevitable death.

Schopenhauer denied all the tenets of Christianity, including the immortality of the soul. According to Schopenhauer, the domination of world evil and faith in God are incompatible.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher and philologist, the brightest propagandist of individualism, voluntarism and irrationalism.

According to Nietzsche, the world is a constant becoming and aimlessness, which is expressed in the idea of "the eternal return of the same".

Following Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche called the will the basis of the world:

As the driving force of becoming;

Like a rush;

As "will to power";

The will to expand your Self, to expand. Nietzsche's central concept is the idea of life. He is the founder of the direction, which is called the philosophy of life.

In man, according to Nietzsche, the main thing is the principle of corporality and, in general, the biological organism; the intellect is only the highest layer necessary for the preservation of organismic formations, primarily instincts.

Henri Bergson. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) - French thinker, representative of intuitionism and philosophy of life.

Bergson's views can be defined as a departure from the materialistic-mechanistic and positivist direction of philosophical thought.

Most important are his teachings: on the intensity of sensations; time; free will; memory in its relation to time; creative evolution; the role of intuition in understanding things.

Bergson proposed life as a substance as a kind of integrity that differs from matter and spirit: life is directed "up", and matter - "down".

The meaning of life, according to Bergson, is comprehensible only with the help of intuition, interpreted as a kind of sympathy, accessible to direct penetration into the essence of the subject by merging with its unique nature.

Issues that interested Bergson:

Soul and body;

The idea of spiritual energy;

Dreams, etc.

They were of particular importance to him because:

He wanted to "liberate" the spirit from the body and thereby prove the possibility of the immortality of the soul;

His interest in spiritualism and telepathy was connected with them.

Karl Marx. Karl Marx (1818-1883) - philosopher and socialist, creator of the "Communist Manifesto", founder of historical materialism.

Marx and Engels create their own new philosophy called "new materialism".

Applying materialist dialectics to the analysis of social life, K. Marx made two discoveries: the "secret" of surplus value in capitalist society; materialistic understanding of history.

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN A. SCHOPENHAUER, F. NIETZSCHE, K. MARX, A. BERGSON, W. JAMES

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Arthur Schopenhauer did not agree with the concept of the mind as an area of conscious mental activity of human consciousness, introducing unconsciously irrational moments into it.

Schopenhauer saw the basic fact of consciousness in representation.

Intuition is the first and most important kind of knowledge. The whole world of reflection is built on intuition.

According to Schopenhauer, only contemplation, free from any relation to practice and to the interests of the will, can be truly perfect knowledge. Scientific thinking is always conscious, because it is aware of its principles and actions, while the activity of an artist, on the contrary, is unconscious, irrational: it is not able to understand its own essence.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The form of presentation of philosophical ideas by Friedrich Nietzsche is aphorisms, myths, sermons, polemics, declarations.

According to Nietzsche, in the mind are connected:

Antique installation on the value of the objective world, the focus of attention on it;

The personal skill of the work of consciousness with itself. Nietzsche sought to create the foundations of a new morality of the "superman" instead of the Christian one, to find a new path of religious consciousness. The world, according to Nietzsche:

This is life, which is not identical with organic processes: its sign is becoming;

This is the will to power.

Karl Marx(1818-1883). Karl Marx was the ancestor of the idea of the secondary nature of consciousness, its conditionality, determinism by factors external to it and, above all, by economic ones.

According to Marx, it is not consciousness that determines being and the world of phenomena, but vice versa: being determines consciousness, consciousness is conscious being.

Karl Marx argued that a person, his consciousness and his entire spiritual life are determined by graceless social and economic relations.

Marx proposed to analyze consciousness and its content through the study of subject-practical forms of human activity, that is, to analyze consciousness woven into the existence of people.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Henri Bergson is one of the brightest representatives of the philosophy of life.

The most important philosophical work of Bergson is the "Experience on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", in which he introduces the concept of "pure duration" - the essence of consciousness and being.

Bergson, in his philosophy, turned to the life of our consciousness: after all, it is given to us directly in our self-consciousness, which shows that the finest fabric of mental life is duration, i.e., continuous variability of states.

Bergson's doctrine of the nature of consciousness and the conditions for the possibility of an open society was characterized in its time as a revolution in philosophy.

William James (1842–1910). William James is a North American philosopher, in his opinion, consciousness is dissected and has an expedient structure.

One of the most famous works of James - "Does Consciousness Exist", in which the philosopher denies the existence of consciousness as a special entity related to something.

In his opinion, the personality (a certain volitional center), and not consciousness, refers to the flow of sensations and experiences, which are the last reality given to us in experience.

Z. FREUD, HIS FOLLOWERS AND OPPONENTS

Sigmund Freud is an Austrian psychologist, neuropathologist, psychiatrist, he is characterized by studies of the phenomena of the unconscious, their nature, forms and methods of manifestation.

Freud's main works containing philosophical ideas and concepts:

- "Mass psychology and analysis of the human "I"";

- “Beyond the pleasure principle”;

- "I" and "It";

- "Psychology of the Unconscious";

- "Dissatisfaction in culture";

- "Civilization and analysis of the human "I"" and others. Freud put forward:

The hypothesis of the exclusive role of sexuality in the emergence of neuroses;

A statement about the role of the unconscious and the possibility of its knowledge through the interpretation of dreams;

The hypothesis that the mental activity of the unconscious is subject to the principle of pleasure, and the mental activity of the subconscious - to the principle of reality.

For Freud's philosophy, the main idea is that people's behavior is controlled by irrational mental forces, and not by the laws of social development, that the intellect is an apparatus for masking these forces, and not a means of actively reflecting reality, of its ever more in-depth understanding.

Freud's main study is the role of the most important, in his opinion, engine of a person's mental life - "libido" (sexual desire), which determines contradictions:

Human and social environment;

Human and culture;

Man and civilization.

Through the prism of sublimation, Freud considered:

Formation of religious rites and cults;

The emergence of science;

Self-development of mankind.

From the side of philosophy, Freud gives his understanding of man and culture. Culture appears to him as a "Super-I", based on the refusal to satisfy the desires of the unconscious, it exists due to the sublimated energy of the libido.

In his work "Dissatisfaction in Culture", Freud concludes that the progress of culture reduces human happiness, increases a person's sense of guilt due to the limitation of his natural desires.

In considering the social organization of society, Freud focuses not on its supra-individual nature, but on a person's natural tendency to destruction, aggression, which can be curbed by culture.

Carl Gustav Jung is a Swiss psychologist, philosopher, culturologist, he began his career as the closest associate of Sigmund Freud and popularizer of his ideas.

After Jung's break with Freud, there is a revision of ideas about the origin of human creativity and the development of human culture from the point of view of "libido" and "sublimation", the displacement of sexuality and all manifestations of the unconscious through the "Super-I".

"Libido" in Jung's understanding is not just some kind of sexual desire, but a flow of vital-psychic energy. Jung introduced into scientific research such objects as the doctrine of karma, reincarnation, parapsychological phenomena, etc. The main works of K.G. Jung: "Metamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido"; "Psychological types"; "Relations between the Self and the Unconscious"; "An Attempt at a Psychological Interpretation of the Dogma of the Trinity".

The most interesting representative of neo-Freudianism was Erich Fromm.

Main works: "Escape from freedom"; "Concept M

FREUD'S PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NEOFREUDISM, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Sigmund Freud - Austrian psychologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, he studied the phenomena of the unconscious, their nature, forms and ways of manifestation.

The main works of Freud, which contain philosophical ideas and concepts: "Mass psychology and analysis of the human "I""; "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"; "I" and "It"; "Psychology of the Unconscious"; "Dissatisfaction in culture"; "Civilization and analysis of the human "I"", etc.

Freud put forward a hypothesis about the role of the unconscious and the possibility of its knowledge through the interpretation of dreams.

Freud assumed that the mental activity of the unconscious is subject to the pleasure principle, and the mental activity of the subconscious is subject to the reality principle.

The main thing in the philosophy of Sigmund Freud was the idea that people's behavior is controlled by irrational mental forces, and not by the laws of social development, that the intellect is an apparatus for disguising these forces, and not a means of actively reflecting reality, more and more in-depth understanding of it.

The most important, according to Freud, the engine of a person's mental life is "libido" (sexual desire), which determines the contradictions between a person and the social environment, a person and culture, a person and civilization.

In his psychoanalysis, Freud considered:

Formation of religious cults and rituals;

The emergence of art and public institutions;

The emergence of science;

Self-development of mankind.

Freud argued that the main part of the human psyche is unconscious, that a person is in constant striving to satisfy his inclinations, desires, and society is a hostile environment that seeks to limit or completely deprive a person of the satisfaction of his passions.

According to Freud, the personality is divided into the id; I (ego); Super-I (Super-ego).

It is the sphere of the unconscious, subordinated only to the principle of pleasure, it has no doubts, contradictions and denials.

Freud divides any instincts and associated drives into two opposite groups:

Ego drives (instincts of death, aggression, destruction);

Sexual instincts (life instincts).

Freud proposes to consider the consciousness of the individual as a system of external prohibitions and rules (Super-ego), and the true content of the individual (Ego) as something "supraconscious" (It), which contains impulsive drives and passions.

According to Freud's philosophy, consciousness creates various kinds of norms, laws, commandments, rules that suppress the subconscious sphere, being for it the censorship of the spirit.

The subconscious sphere manifests itself in the areas:

Abnormal (dreams, random reservations, typos, forgetting, etc.);

Abnormal (neurosis, psychosis, etc.). Neo-Freudianism is a trend in modern philosophy and psychology that combines the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud with American sociological theories. The main representatives of neo-Freudianism:

Karen Horney;

Harry Sullivan;

Erich From and others.

The main idea of neo-Freudians was interpersonal relationships. Their main question was the question of how a person should live and what to do.

Society is recognized as hostile to the fundamental trends in the development of the individual and the transformation of his life values and ideals.

THE IDEA OF THE SUPERMAN IN F. NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) - German philosopher and philologist, the brightest propagandist of individualism, voluntarism and irrationalism.

There are three periods in Nietzsche's work:

1) 1871–1876 (“The Birth of Tragedies from the Spirit of Music”, “Untimely Reflections”);

2) 1876–1877 (“Human, too human”, “Colorful opinions and sayings”, “The Wanderer and his shadow”, “Merry Science”) - a period of disappointment and criticism - “sober”;

3) 1887–1889 (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Twilight of the Idols”, “Antichrist”, “Nietzsche against Wagner”).

Cognition for Nietzsche is interpretation, interpretation, closely related to the inner life of a person, he rightly notes that the same text allows for multiple interpretations, since thought is a sign with many meanings. To understand a thing, it is necessary to translate the human into the natural, therefore one of the most important means of cognition is the translation of the human into the natural.

According to Nietzsche, man is “a disease of the Earth”, he is fleeting, he “is fundamentally something erroneous”. But it is necessary to create a genuine, new person - a "superman" who would give a goal, would be the winner of "being and nothingness" and would be honest, first of all to himself.

The main problem of man, his essence and nature is the problem of his spirit.

According to Nietzsche, spirit:

This is endurance;

Courage and freedom;

assertion of your will.

The main goal of human aspirations is not benefit, not pleasure, not truth, not the Christian God, but life. Life is cosmic and biological: it is the will to power as the principle of world existence and "eternal return". The will to live must manifest itself not in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a battle for power and superiority, for the formation of a new person.

In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims:

That man is something that must be overcome;

All beings created something that is higher than them;

People want to become the ebb of this great wave, they are ready to return to the beasts than to overcome man.

The real greatness of man is that he is a bridge, not a goal. Nietzsche wrote: "Man is a rope stretched between animals and the superman."

Nietzsche's superman is the meaning of being, the salt of the earth. In his opinion, the superman will take the place of the dead God. Nietzsche believes that the idea of the superman as a goal to be achieved returns to man the lost meaning of existence. The superman can only come from a generation of aristocrats, masters by nature, in whom the will to power is not crushed by a culture hostile to it, from those who, united with their own kind, are able to resist the majority who do not want to know anything about the true destiny of modern people.

Nietzsche, under the influence of Dühring's physical and cosmological research, developed the idea of eternal return, which should compensate for the hope lost along with Christianity for a possible eternal life beyond the grave. If we follow this idea logically, then people are doomed to eternity, because they already live in eternity. Eternity, according to Nietzsche, coincides with the moment.

The main feature of the irrationalism of the 19th century lies in the criticism of reason, science, logic, systemicity, since rationality and its consequences destroy the ever-becoming and developing life itself. Representatives of this trend Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believe that the central characteristic human is something irrational, mystical, incomprehensible by means of science and logic, inexplicable and inexpressible in the conceptual thinking.

The reason for the emergence of irrationalism is the crisis of German transcendental philosophy. Representatives of the non-classical type of philosophy saw in I. Kant and G. Hegel only pure theory and scholastic schematism, which do not explain, but only simplify and schematize the contradictory and mysterious life. Therefore, the central task non-classical philosophy is to discover some primary irrational reality behind the dominance of rationality (“hungry will” in A. Schopenhauer, “absurd faith” in S. Kierkegaard, “will to power” in F. Nietzsche).

Like other representatives of non-classical philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) argues that the basis of man, his generic essence is not reason, but some kind of blind, unconscious life force, unreasonable will. The mind in human life plays a secondary and dependent on the role of the will.

Criticizing German classical philosophy, A. Schopenhauer, however, uses the main ideas and achievements of the latter. The main work of A. Schopenhauer "The World as Will and Representation" (1816) was written under the direct influence of the philosophy of I. Kant. Just as I. Kant distinguishes between “appearance” and the unknowable “thing in itself”, A. Schopenhauer considers the world as a representation (“appearance”) and as will (“thing in itself”). The world in which a person lives is declared by the philosopher to be an inauthentic world of representation. Here everything is an appearance, a mirage, a veil of Maya. In this world, it is almost impossible to distinguish between reality and dream, reality and appearance. In the world as a representation there is no place for freedom, because here, everything is subject to the power of reason, the dominance of space and time and the law of causality.

The true meaning of the world, the philosopher believes, is hidden and represents an irrational will. Will is the heart of the world, the grain of everything that exists, it manifests itself in all objects and phenomena. The will is not subject to the power of reason, it is reckless, eternal and infinite, absolutely free. The main property of the will is Overcoming itself. The eternally "hungry" will must "devour" itself, because it represents an endless striving, an eternal becoming. Its properties are insatiability, eternal dissatisfaction with what has been achieved and the endless overcoming of its frozen, ossified forms. The highest manifestation of the will, according to A. Schopenhauer, is a person, therefore, in his nature one can also find an eternal desire for the unknown, constant conflicts and the struggle with the world and with oneself, all this is a constant source of endless human suffering. Man, the philosopher believes, is doomed to suffering, getting rid of them is impossible. Being a big fan of philosophy Buddhism, A. Schopenhauer proposes to get rid of the inevitable human suffering by denying life itself, the source of which is the will (the cause of all suffering). The ideal and model for A. Schopenhauer is the asceticism of Christian ascetics and the achievement of Buddhist nirvana: a person remains to live, but life means nothing to him.

For Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who is often called the ideological forerunner of the philosophy of existentialism, the problem of human personalities, its originality and uniqueness, its tragic fate becomes the most important theme of all philosophy.

The main thing in a person, S. Kierkegaard believes, is not reason, but a mystical irrational riddle, which the philosopher calls existence (from Latin - existence). Reason and existence are opposite things. If Descartes says “I think, therefore I exist”, then S. Kierkegaard declares: “the less I think, the more I exist”, thus showing that the mind is completely helpless in revealing the secret of existence.

Existence is the deep mystical essence of a person, his core, a mystery that cannot be described or rationally defined in terms. No scientific or rational methods are suitable for the knowledge of man. A person can penetrate into the essence of human existence, discover the meaning of his life only in certain critical situations of vital choice, in the so-called existential situations, when the meaning of human life is revealed. The "meeting" with one's own existence does not take place in abstract thoughts, but in difficulty, risk and the choice of "either-or". Trying to reveal the essence of existence and discover the meaning of human life, S. Kierkegaard in his work "Stages on the path of life" considers the various stages of human existence.

At the aesthetic stage (symbol - Don Juan), a person is turned to the outside world, immersed in life feelings. The values of this stage are youth, health, beauty. A person strives to know and experience all kinds of pleasure: from the lowest, physical to the highest intellectual. This is the position of hedonism (life is pleasure). But the more a person indulges in pleasures, the stronger his dissatisfaction and disappointment become. A person is seized by boredom, which brings him to the brink of despair. A person realizes the untruth of his way of life and the need to choose a higher stage.

At the ethical stage (symbol - Socrates) is dominated by a sense of duty. Man voluntarily submits to the moral law. The disadvantage of this position, Kierkegaard believes, is the subordination of man to a universal law, that is, to something external in relation to his own existence. It turns out that a person at this stage cannot be himself in the true sense.

Only at the religious stage (the symbol is Abraham), when the mind cannot save a person and help him, does a person find himself alone with himself and the true absolute. Only an absurd faith can save a person. S. Kierkegaard believes that the meaning of human existence is revealed only through existential fear, through despair associated with the rejection of reason. Fear, like fire, burns all bridges, all illusions and reveals the true essence of a person and the meaning of his existence. As if "turning inside out" dialectics G. Hegel Kierkegaard believes that the comprehension of the meaning of human existence, the disclosure of the secret of existence and the connection with the world of the transcendent is carried out instantly as a result of an irrational leap.

Criticism of the rationalism of the previous classical philosophy is also observed in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in whose work there are three stages: 1. "Romantic" period (1871-1876). The main works of this period: "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music", "Untimely Reflections". This is the period of romanticism, passion for classical ancient literature, music by R. Wagner, philosophy of A. Schopenhauer. 2. "Positivist" period (1876-1877). Main works: "Human, too human", "Various opinions and sayings", "The Wanderer and his shadow". This period is characterized by Nietzsche's fascination with the natural sciences, especially biology and the theory of Charles Darwin. 3. "Destructive" period (1877-1889). Major works: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil", "On the Genealogy of Morals". At this stage, the main headings of Nietzsche's philosophy were formulated and revealed: "the will to power", the furnace return of the same, the reassessment of all values, European nihilism, the idea of the superman.

In his early work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, devoted to the analysis of ancient Greek culture, F. Nietzsche identifies two ontological principles that permeate Greek music, tragedy, philosophy and culture as a whole.

The Dionysian beginning - the beginning is irrational, excessive, strong-willed Nietzsche characterizes it as soaring, dancing, creative, creating. This is the beginning of universality and unity. Apollonian - the beginning of reason and harmony, symmetry and measure; the beginning is systematic, conceptual, scientific, theoretical. F. Nietzsche believes that at the beginning of development in Greek tragedy, for example, in Aeschylus, the Dionysian choral principle prevails; the harmonious unity of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles is found in the tragedies of Sophocles, where the parties of the choir and heroes are almost equal; and in the future, the Apollonian beginning gradually begins to come to the fore, in particular with Euripides. In the middle of the 5th century BC. the Apollonian principle turns into a purely theoretical Socratic principle, emasculated, lifeless and dead. F. Nietzsche considered Socrates himself a “murderer” ancient philosophy and culture and the first Western European in spirit.

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Lit.: Rickert G., Philosophy of life, P., 1922; Messer A., Lebensphilosophie, Lpz., 1931; Misch G., Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, Lpz., 1931, Lersch Ph., Lebensphilosophie der Gegenwart, B., 1932; Hennig J. Lebensbegriff und Lebenskategorie, Aachen, 1934; Lersch Ph, Grundsätzliches zur Lebensphilosophie, "Blätter für deutsche Philosophy", 1936, Bd 10, H 1, A1mi E. A., Our finished world. A philosophy of life - in discourse, story and fable, N.Y., 1947, Lenz J., Vorschule der Weisheit. Einleitung in eine Wissenschaftliche Lebensphilosophie, Würzburg, 1948, Εstiú Ε. Introduction a la filosofia de la vida en Alemama, "Revista de filosofia", 1963, No 12–13.

P. Gaidenko. Moscow.

Philosophical Encyclopedia. In 5 volumes - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia. Edited by F. V. Konstantinov. 1960-1970 .

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE (Lebensphilosophie) - a review of an extremely wide range of philosophical concepts, and in most cases was used by certain thinkers not to characterize their philosophy as a whole, but to clarify its individual aspects. In this sense, Dilthey derives his concept of life from such thinkers as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Machiavelli, Montaigne and Pascal. Sometimes Socrates, the French moralists and Goethe were also called “philosophers of life”. The concept has remained most popular in German-speaking culture; in English and French, if it was used, then, as it was, it was interpreted from biological positions. In a broad sense, the philosophy of life is the direction of Western European philosophy of con. 19 - beg. 20th century, whose representatives, adhering to different philosophical positions, opposed the classical ideal of rational philosophy. Characteristic of this current was greater attention to the problem of man, attempts to consider it in its “wholeness” and in all the diversity of its spiritual forces or to single out certain aspects of its nature as basic, fundamental (“will” by Schopenhauer, “will to power” by Nietzsche) . What all these efforts had in common was that they were in opposition to the traditional idea of "reason" and, accordingly, to German classical philosophy. The concept of “man”, or “life”, becomes one of the key ones for this. The philosophy of life in the broad sense includes Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, Spengler, Simmel, Klages, Spranger, and others. The philosophy of life in the narrow sense is represented by both Dilthey and the school based on his philosophy. A significant share of the responsibility for combining all these heterogeneous philosophies into one "trend" lies with Rickert's Philosophy of Life (1920), in which the author attempts to refute the ideas that gained extraordinary popularity in the first decades of the 20th century and show that they are a symptom of a common crisis of philosophy. The outcome of the confrontation between the philosophy of life and neo-Kantianism took shape in the 1920s and 30s. not in favor of the latest trend. Thus, Cassirer, in a well-known discussion in Davos in 1929 with Heidegger, complained about the injustice of the younger generation of philosophers who identified neo-Kantianism with outdated philosophy and blamed this trend for the crisis in which philosophy was in the beginning. 20th century turned out. About

The general critical attitude of the philosophy of life to Avnyats" was indeed reproduced in relation to existential philosophy (primarily Jaspers) to neo-Kantianism. In German philosophy, two periods can be distinguished when the term "philosophy of life" became popular: late 18th - early 19th century. and the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries At the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the philosophy of life was synonymous with the “philosophy of practical life” as a reaction to the rationalist philosophy of Kant, Wolff and their school, with its division into theoretical and practical philosophy. In the 18th century, a philosophical trend was formed that first began to use this term.As synonyms, "practical philosophy", "wisdom of life", "science of life", "art of life", etc. were used. This "practical philosophy" was to be aimed at the spread of ethical and pragmatic principles of behavior, to be addressed not to a “specialist”, but to someone who is in real life.In the same sense, the philosophers of the Enlightenment spoke about the philosophy of life. The development of a pragmatically oriented philosophy of life is being prepared by the awakening of interest in pedagogical problems (under the influence of Rousseau), the interweaving of pedagogy and psychology (especially experimental - Pestalozzi, Herbart).

In the title of the work, the term “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie) was first registered in an anonymous treatise “On the Moral Beauty and Philosophy of Life” (author G. Shirakh); a little later, “Works on the Philosophy of Life” appear (K. Moritz, 1772). In 1790, even the Journal of the Philosophy of Life appeared. The term “philosophy of life” becomes popular, penetrates fiction In the beginning. 19th century philosophy of life is used to refer to the systematic constructions of authors who do not belong to the number of professional philosophers, characterizing the rich life experience that arose from real life. This experience is systematized and summarized in numerous collections of aphorisms, which contributes to the popularity of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. At the same time, another understanding of the term is being formed, closer to the tradition of the philosophy of life con. 19th century: in 1827 Schlegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Life, opposes any kind of systematics; philosophy of life strives to unite "philosophy" and "life", "poetry" and "thinking" for the first time in an explicit form, the superiority of the philosophy of life over "theoretical philosophy" is explicitly formulated, "experience" and "experience of truth" are opposed to logical proof. These tendencies have a strong influence on the school of German Romanticism. The rationality of thinking is opposed (including by Schleiermacher and Novalis) to the immediacy of faith and the living “deeps of the soul” (des Gemutes). Although two circumstances - the special role of the heritage of ancient philosophy and a specific attitude towards Christianity - constitute a significant difference between the formed by the beginning of the 19th century. "romantic" philosophy and the philosophy of life of Nietzsche, the latter as a whole inherits one of its most important features - anti-rationalism. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche tells how the Greek "theoretical man" tried to reconcile art and science with life. The antagonism between history as a science and life also becomes the theme of his “On the Benefits and Harms of History for Life”. History (Historié) should not be "pure science" but should serve "the whole of life", which is a non-historical force. The youth must again “learn to live”, “life precedes knowledge”. At first, Nietzsche hopes for a new "birth of life", a renewal of the Dionysian "fullness of life" through art and music; later, however, he admits that he should be more attentive to the "tragic" in life. While to ser. 19th century Philosophy of life is quite often used to refer to philosophical disciplines about the organic and biological processes of life, and also as a general concept for various biological theories of life, Nietzsche opposes the organicist understanding of life (primarily Spencer), believing that the physiological preservation of oneself by an organism is only the secondary of a deeper phenomenon - life as a spontaneous, aggressive and formative force. It is on this understanding of life as “appropriation, damage, overcoming and suppression of the alien, weaker” that one of the key ideas for Nietzsche is based - “the will to power”.

Dewey, James) contributes to the formation of an extremely broad tradition, conventionally referred to as the philosophy of life, in that it shows the importance of the theory of truth for human life. Dilthey, like Bergson, rejects traditional metaphysics. Both thinkers strive to transfer the methods they have developed for the particular sciences back into the whole of philosophy. At the same time, Bergson assumes an extra-rational possibility of cognition, which he calls intuition and which, in contrast to discursive cognition, is a complex comprehension of an object, through which we are transported “inside the object in order to merge with it.” It is thanks to this that intuition, which itself has a vital nature, can "lead us to the very depths of life." Dilthey offers a whole range of methods (descriptive psychology, comparative psychology of individuality, the historical method, the method of analyzing the objectification of human life, etc.), which together can, in his opinion, bring us closer to the mystery of human life. At the same time, the focus on understanding life distinguishes Dilthey's philosophy from all poetic-free sketches of the so-called. "life philosophies", as well as from the irrationalist currents of the philosophy of life. Even more precisely, the specificity of Dilthe's philosophy is determined by the fact that it is a historically oriented philosophy of life. “What a man is, only his history can tell him.” The concepts of “life” and “historical reality” are often used by Dilthey as equivalent, since historical reality itself is understood as “living”, endowed with life-giving historical power: “Life ... in its material is one with history. History is just life, viewed from the point of view of a whole humanity...”

The three largest representatives of the philosophy of life in the beginning. 20th century are Simmel, Scheler and Spengler. Simmel also believes that the intellect "rips apart the material" of life and things, turning it into tools, systems and concepts. Although "life" and "concept" are not completely opposed to them, he believes that life does not follow a rational, but a "vital" logic; it is impossible to give an exact life, but it can be understood as "constantly overstepping the boundaries." This is precisely what life cannot have in itself. Simmel also believes that it is inherent in life to produce “more life”, “to be even more life” and to form something “more than life” - that is, to create cultural formations (cf. Hegel and Dilthey’s “objectification of life”, as well as a discussion problems of culture in neo-Kantianism). The position of Scheler, who believed that life is an “original phenomenon” that cannot be dissolved either in the phenomena of consciousness, or in bodily mechanisms, or in the combination of these two aspects, being a precedent for a kind of connection between the philosophy of life and phenomenology, had a great influence on Heidegger. In Spengler's philosophy of life, the separate philosophies of Dilthey are combined (contrasting the humanities and natural sciences), but the method of description is rejected. Spengler's more biologically oriented philosophy of life attempts to "take a more open-minded look" at world history, to see the "spectacle of a plurality of cultures", each of which has "its own form ... its own idea, its own life, its own death." In the 20th century ideas of the philosophy of life developed Ch. O. thinkers, in one way or another relying on Dilthey. Meanwhile, individual representatives of the philosophy of life (Litt, Spranger, Klages) are often reproached for excessive acceptance of the irrational aspect of the philosophy of life; they are credited with a certain share of responsibility for in the 20s. 20th century vulgar philosophy of life, the development of anti-liberal sentiments in Germany, which, along with understanding the experience of war and exalting the “experience of war” (the Junger brothers (see F. Junger, E. Junger), etc.), according to many modern sociologists and political scientists (Sontheimer etc.), contributed to the coming of the National Socialist Party to power.

The latest philosophical dictionary

Life philosophy is a system of views of a person. The search for answers to the main questions in life, what is its meaning, why, what and how to do, does not stop. Since ancient times, the minds of philosophers have been philosophizing on this. Dozens of teachings have been formed, but still people ask themselves these questions.

What is the philosophy of life?

The concept of "philosophy of life" has two meanings:

Personal philosophy, in the center of which is the solution of existential questions about the human condition.
Philosophical trend that originated in Germany in the second half of the 19th century as a reaction to rationalism. Main Representatives:

Wilhelm Dilthey;
Henri Bergson;
Pierre Ado;
Friedrich Nietzsche;
Georg Simmel;
Arthur Schopenhauer.

The concept of life in philosophy

Life definition in philosophy occupied the minds of many thinkers. The term itself is ambiguous and can be considered from different points of view:

biological (as a form of existence of matter);
psychological (as a form of existence of consciousness);
cultural and historical (as a form of human existence).

Philosophy of life - basic ideas

The philosophy of life united various directions united by common ideas. It arose as a reaction to the outdated philosophical traditions conditioned by rationalism. The ideas of the philosophy of life are that being is the fundamental principle, and only through it can something be comprehended. All rational methods of knowing the world are in the past. They are being replaced by irrational ones. Feelings, instincts, faith are the main tools for understanding reality.

Irrationalism and philosophy of life

Irrationalism is based on the uniqueness of human experience, the importance of instincts and feelings, as opposed to rational knowledge. He, like romanticism in literature, became a reaction to rationalism. It was reflected in the historicism and relativism of Wilhelm Dilthey. For him, all knowledge was conditioned by a personal historical perspective, so he asserted the importance of the humanities.

Johann Georg Hamann, a German philosopher, rejected the process of reflection, sought the truth in feeling and faith. Personal certainty is the ultimate criterion of truth. His colleague in the literary group "Storm and Onslaught" Friedrich Jacobi exalted the certainty and clarity of faith to the detriment of intellectual knowledge.

Friedrich Schelling and Henri Bergson, preoccupied with the uniqueness of human experience, turned to intuitionism, which "sees things invisible to science." Reason itself has not been annulled, it has lost its leading role. - the engine underlying existence. Pragmatism, existentialism, irrationalism is a philosophy of life that has expanded the idea of human life and thought.

The meaning of human life - philosophy

The problem of the meaning of life in philosophy has been and remains relevant. Answers to the questions, what is the meaning of life and what makes life meaningful, have been sought by philosophers of various directions over the centuries:

Ancient philosophers were unanimous in the opinion that the essence of human life lies in the pursuit of good, happiness. For Socrates, happiness is equal to the perfection of the soul. For Aristotle - the embodiment of human essence. The essence of a person is his soul. Spiritual work, thinking and knowledge lead to the achievement of happiness. Epicurus saw meaning (happiness) in pleasure, which he represented not as pleasure, but as the absence of fear, physical and spiritual suffering.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, the idea of the meaning of life was directly related to traditions, religious ideals and class values. Here there is a similarity with the philosophy of life in India, where the repetition of the life of ancestors, the preservation of class status are key.
Philosophers of the XIX-XX centuries believed that human life is meaningless and absurd. Schopenhauer argued that all religions and philosophies are just attempts to find meaning and make a meaningless life bearable. Existentialists, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, equated life with absurdity, and only a person could, by his own actions and choice, give it some meaning.
Modern positivist and pragmatic approaches argue that life acquires the meaning that is important for the individual within the framework of his reality. It can be anything - achievements, career, family, art, travel. What a particular person appreciates his life for and what he aspires to. This philosophy of life is very close to many modern people.

Philosophy of life and death

The problem of life and death in philosophy is one of the key ones. Death is the result of the process of life. Man, like any biological organism, is mortal, but unlike other animals, he is aware of his mortality. This pushes him to think about the meaning of life and death. All philosophical teachings can be divided into two types:

No life after death. After death, there is no existence; together with the body of a person, his soul, his consciousness, also dies.
There is life after death. Religious-idealistic approach, life on earth is a preparation for or reincarnation.

Books on the philosophy of life for self-development

Fiction can be an excellent source for philosophical enlightenment. Not only scientific or popular science books written by philosophers introduce new philosophical ideas and give impetus. Five books that present the philosophy of human life:

"Outsider". Albert Camus. The book is fiction, in it the author managed to reflect the main ideas of existentialism, even better than in philosophical treatises.
"Siddhartha". Hermann Hesse. This book will take your thoughts from worries about the future to thoughts about the beauty of the present.
"The Picture of Dorian Grey". Oscar Wilde. A great book on the dangers of pride and vanity, in it the reader will find much self-reflection and sensory quest.
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche built one of the most original and radical philosophies in his entire history. His ideas continue to send shockwaves through the Christian community. Most people dismiss Nietzsche's slogan that "God is dead," but in this work, Nietzsche actually explains the claim and comes up with interesting ideas about life on earth.
"Transformation". Franz Kafka. Waking up one day, the hero of the story discovers that he has turned into a large insect...

Films about the philosophy of life

Directors turn to the theme of human life in their films. Movies about the philosophy of life that will make you think:

"Tree of Life". Directed by Terrence Malick. This movie raises millions of rhetorical questions about the meaning of life, the problem of human identity.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". Michel Gondry's painting, released in 2004, is a kind of philosophical teaching on how to live your life, accept mistakes and not forget about them.
"Fountain". Fantastic movie from Darren Aranofsky will show new interpretations of reality.

(1880-1936), Ludwig Klages (1872-1956). This direction includes thinkers of very different orientations - both in their own theoretical, and especially in worldview terms.

The philosophy of life arises in the 60-70s of the XIX century, reaches its greatest influence in the first quarter of the XX century; subsequently, its significance decreases, but a number of its principles are borrowed by such areas as existentialism, personalism, and others. In some respects, such directions are close to the philosophy of life as, firstly, neo-Hegelianism with its desire to create sciences about the spirit as a living and creative principle, as opposed to the sciences about nature (for example, V. Dilthey can also be called a representative of neo-Hegelianism); secondly, pragmatism with its understanding of truth as usefulness for life; thirdly, phenomenology with its requirement of direct contemplation of phenomena (phenomena) as wholes, in contrast to mediating thinking, which constructs the whole from its parts.

The ideological forerunners of the philosophy of life are, first of all, the German romantics, with whom many representatives of this trend have in common an anti-bourgeois attitude, a longing for a strong, unsplit individuality, and a desire for unity with nature. Like romanticism, the philosophy of life starts from a mechanistic-rational worldview and gravitates toward the organic. This is expressed not only in her demand to directly contemplate the unity of the organism (here the model for all German philosophers of life is J. W. Goethe), but also in the thirst for a "return to nature" as an organic universe, which gives rise to a tendency to pantheism. Finally, in line with the philosophy of life, a characteristic interest, especially for the Jena school of romanticism and romantic philology with its doctrine of hermeneutics, is revived in the historical study of such "living wholes" as myth, religion, art, language.

The main concept of the philosophy of life - "life" - is vague and ambiguous; depending on its interpretation, one can distinguish variants of this current. Life is understood both biologically - as a living organism, and psychologically - as a stream of experiences, and culturally and historically - as a "living spirit", and metaphysically - as the initial principle of the entire universe. Although each representative of this trend uses the concept of life in almost all these meanings, however, as a rule, either a biological, or a psychological, or a cultural-historical interpretation of life turns out to be predominant.

The biological-naturalistic understanding of life is most clearly expressed by F. Nietzsche. It appears here as the being of a living organism as opposed to a mechanism, as "natural" as opposed to "artificial", original as opposed to constructed, primordial as opposed to derivative. This trend, represented in addition to Nietzsche by such names as L. Klages, T. Lessing, anatomist L. Bolk, paleographer and geologist E. Dake, ethnologist L. Frobenius and others, is characterized by irrationalism, a sharp opposition to spirit and reason: the rational principle is considered here as a special kind of disease peculiar to the human race; many representatives of this trend are distinguished by a penchant for primitiveness and the cult of strength. These thinkers are not alien to the positivist-naturalistic desire to reduce any idea to the "interests", "instincts" of an individual or a social group. Good and evil, truth and falsehood are declared "beautiful illusions"; in a pragmatic spirit, that which strengthens life turns out to be good and true, and that which weakens it turns out to be evil and false. This variant of the philosophy of life is characterized by the substitution of the personal principle by the individual, and the individual by the genus (totality).

Another variant of the philosophy of life is connected with the cosmological-metaphysical interpretation of the concept of "life"; the most prominent philosopher here is A. Bergson. He understands life as a cosmic energy, a vital force, as a "life impulse" (elan vital), the essence of which is the continuous reproduction of oneself and the creation of new forms; the biological form of life is recognized as only one of the manifestations of life along with its soul-spiritual manifestations. “Life in reality belongs to the psychological order, and the essence of the psychic is to embrace a vague multiplicity of mutually penetrating members ... But what belongs to the psychological nature cannot be accurately applied to space, nor enter completely into the framework of reason.”

Since the substance of mental life, according to Bergson, is time as pure "duration" (duree), fluidity, variability, it cannot be known conceptually, by means of rational construction, but is comprehended directly - intuitively. True, that is, life time, Bergson considers not as a simple sequence of moments, like a sequence of points on a spatial segment, but as an interpenetration of all elements of duration, their internal connection, different from physical, spatial rowing. In Bergson's concept, the metaphysical interpretation of life is combined with its psychological interpretation: it is psychologism that permeates both ontology (the doctrine of being) and the theory of knowledge of the French philosopher.

Both naturalistic and metaphysical understanding of life are characterized, as a rule, by an ahistorical approach. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the essence of life is always the same, and since life is the essence of being, the latter is always something equal to itself. According to him, this is an "eternal return." For Nietzsche, the flow of life in time is only its external form, not related to the very content of life.

The essence of life is interpreted differently by thinkers who create a historical version of the philosophy of life, which could be characterized as a philosophy of culture (W. Dilthey, G. Simmel, O. Spengler and others). Just like Bergson, in interpreting life "from within," these philosophers proceed from direct inner experience, which, however, for them is not a spiritual-psychic, but a cultural-historical experience. Unlike Nietzsche and, to some extent, Bergson, who focus on the principle of life as an eternal principle of being, here attention is riveted to individual forms of the realization of life, to its inimitable, unique historical images. The criticism of mechanistic natural science, which is characteristic of the philosophy of life, takes the form of a protest against the natural-scientific consideration of spiritual phenomena in general, against reducing them to natural phenomena. Hence the desire of Dilthey, Spengler, Simmel to develop special methods of cognition of the spirit (Dilthey's hermeneutics, Spengler's morphology of history, etc.).

But unlike Nietzsche, Klages and others, the historical trend is not inclined to "expose" spiritual formations - on the contrary, the specific forms of human experience of the world are precisely the most interesting and important for him. True, since life is considered "from within", without being correlated with anything outside of it, it turns out to be impossible to overcome that fundamental illusionism that ultimately deprives all moral and cultural values of their absolute significance, reducing them to more or less long-lived historical values. passing facts. The paradox of the philosophy of life lies in the fact that in its non-historical versions it opposes life to culture as a product of a rational, "artificial" principle, and in the historical one it identifies life and culture (finding an artificial, mechanical principle in the opposed culture of civilization).

Despite the significant difference between these options, their commonality is revealed primarily in the uprising against the dominance of methodologism and epistemology, characteristic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which spread due to the influence of Kantianism and positivism. The philosophy of life demanded a return from formal to substantive problems, from the study of the nature of knowledge to the comprehension of the nature of being, and this was its undoubted contribution to philosophical thought. Criticizing Kantianism and positivism, representatives of the philosophy of life believed that the scientific and systematic form of the latter was acquired at the cost of refusing to solve substantive, metaphysical and worldview problems.

In contrast to these directions, the philosophy of life seeks to create a new metaphysics with a life principle at its core and a new, intuitive theory of knowledge corresponding to it. The life principle, as philosophers of this orientation are convinced, cannot be comprehended either with the help of those concepts in which idealistic philosophy thought, identifying being with the spirit, idea, or with the help of those means that were developed in natural science, which, as a rule, identifies being with the dead. matter, for each of these approaches takes into account only one side of the living integrity. The vital reality is comprehended directly, with the help of intuition, which allows one to penetrate the inside of an object in order to merge with its individual, therefore, inexpressible nature in general terms.

Intuitive knowledge, therefore, does not imply opposition of the knower to the knowable, the subject to the object, on the contrary, it is possible due to the initial identity of both sides, which is based on the same vital principle. By its nature, intuitive knowledge cannot have a universal and necessary character, it is impossible to learn it, as one learns rational thinking, it is rather akin to artistic comprehension of reality. Here the philosophy of life resurrects romantic pan-aestheticism: art acts as a kind of organ (instrument) for philosophy, the cult of creativity and genius is reborn.

The concept of creativity for many philosophers of this trend is essentially a synonym for life; depending on which aspect of creativity seems to be the most important, the nature of their teaching is determined. So, for Bergson, creativity is the birth of the new, the expression of the richness and abundance of the nature that gives birth, the general spirit of his philosophy is optimistic. For Simmel, on the contrary, the most important moment of creativity is its tragic dual nature: the product of creativity - always something inert and frozen - eventually becomes hostile to the creator and the creative principle. Hence the general pessimistic intonation of Simmel, echoing the fatalistic-gloomy pathos of Spengler and ascending to the deepest ideological root of the philosophy of life - the belief in the immutability and inevitability of fate.

The most adequate form of expression of those organic and spiritual integrity, to which the attention of the philosophers of life is riveted, is a means of art - a symbol. In this regard, Goethe's teaching about the primordial phenomenon as a prototype that reproduces itself in all elements of a living structure had the greatest influence on them. Goethe is cited by Spengler, who tried to "unfold" the great cultures of antiquity and modern times from their ancestral phenomenon, that is, the "greater soul symbol" of any culture, from which the latter is born and grows like a plant from a seed. In his cultural-historical essays, Simmel resorts to the same method. Bergson, also considering the symbol (image) as the most adequate form of expression of philosophical content, creates a new idea of philosophy, rethinking the previous understanding of its essence and history.

Any philosophical concept is considered by him as a form of expression of the basic, deep and essentially inexpressible intuition of its creator; it is as unique and individual as the personality of its author, as the face of the era that gave birth to it. As for the conceptual form, the complexity of the philosophical system is the product of incommensurability between the simple intuition of the philosopher and the means by which he seeks to express this intuition. In contrast to Hegel, with whom Bergson is arguing here, the history of philosophy no longer appears as a continuous development and enrichment, the ascent of a single philosophical knowledge, but - by analogy with art - turns out to be a collection of various spiritual contents, intuitions, closed in themselves.

Critically referring to the scientific form of knowledge, representatives of the philosophy of life come to the conclusion that science is unable to comprehend the fluid and elusive nature of life and serves purely pragmatic goals - the transformation of the world in order to adapt it to human interests. Thus, the philosophy of life fixes the fact that science turns into a direct productive force and grows together with technology, the industrial economy as a whole, subordinating the question "what?" and why?" the question "how?", which ultimately boils down to the problem "how is it done?". Comprehending the new function of science, the philosophers of life see scientific concepts as instruments of practical activity that have a very indirect relation to the question "what is truth?".

At this point, the philosophy of life approaches pragmatism, but with an opposite value emphasis; the transformation of science into a productive force and the emergence of an industrial type of civilization do not cause enthusiasm among the majority of representatives of this direction. Philosophers of life oppose the feverish technological progress characteristic of the late 19th-20th centuries and its agents in the person of a scientist, engineer, inventor-technician with aristocratic-individual creativity - the contemplation of an artist, poet, philosopher. Criticizing scientific knowledge, the philosophy of life singles out and contrasts the various principles underlying science and philosophy. According to Bergson, scientific constructions, on the one hand, and philosophical contemplation, on the other, are based on various principles, namely space and time.

Science has succeeded in turning into an object everything that can take the form of space, and everything that has been turned into an object, it seeks to dismember in order to master it; giving a spatial form, the form of a material object, is the only way of constructing one's object, the only one available to science. Therefore, only that reality that does not have a spatial form can resist modern civilization, which turns everything that exists into an object of consumption. The philosophy of life considers time to be such a reality, which, as it were, constitutes the very structure of life. It is impossible to "master" time otherwise than by surrendering to its flow - an "aggressive" way of mastering life reality is impossible.

With all the differences in the interpretation of the concept of time within the philosophy of life, the common thing remains the opposition of "living" time to the so-called natural-scientific, that is, "spatialized" time, which is conceived as a sequence of "now" moments external to each other, indifferent to those phenomena that are in it. flow. The most interesting studies of Bergson (the doctrine of spiritual memory, as opposed to mechanical memory) are associated with the doctrine of time, as well as attempts to build historical time as a unity of the present, past and future, undertaken by Dilthey and developed by T. Litt, X. Ortega-i- Gaset, as well as M. Heidegger.

The philosophy of life not only tried to create a new ontology and find adequate forms of cognition. It also appeared as a special type of worldview, which found its most striking expression in Nietzsche. This worldview can be called neo-paganism. It is based on the idea of the world as an eternal game of irrational elements - life, outside of which there is no higher reality in relation to it. In contrast to positivist philosophy, which seeks to subjugate blind natural forces with the help of reason, Nietzsche demanded to submit to the vital elements, to merge with it in an ecstatic impulse; he saw true heroism not in resisting fate, not in trying to "outwit" fate, but in accepting it, in amor fati - tragic love for fate.

Nietzsche's neo-pagan worldview grows out of his rejection of Christianity. Nietzsche rejects the Christian morality of love and compassion; this morality, he is convinced, is directed against healthy vital instincts and breeds impotence and decadence. Life is a struggle in which the strongest wins. In the person of Nietzsche and other philosophers of life, European consciousness turned against the tragic non-religiousness that prevailed in it, as well as against its Christian roots, acquiring that sharpness and tragedy of worldview that it had long lost.

The tragic motive underlying Nietzsche's philosophy and developed by Spengler, Simmel, Ortega y Gaset and others was perceived by representatives of symbolism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: G. Ibsen, M. Maeterlinck, A. N. Scriabin, A. A. Blok, A. Bely, and later - L. F. Selin, A. Camus, J. P. Sartre. However, often in a paradoxical way, the seemingly courageous "love of fate" turns into the aesthetics of lack of will: the thirst for merging with the elements gives rise to a feeling of sweet horror; the cult of ecstasy forms a consciousness for which intoxication becomes the highest state of life - it doesn't matter what it is - music, poetry, revolution, erotica.

Thus, in the struggle against rational-mechanistic thinking, the philosophy of life in its extreme forms came to the denial of any systematic way of reasoning (as not corresponding to life reality) and thereby to the denial of philosophy, because the latter cannot do without understanding being in terms of and, it became be, without creating a system of concepts. The philosophy of life was not only a reaction to the way of thinking, it also acted as a criticism of industrial society as a whole, where the division of labor also penetrates into spiritual production.

However, along with the cult of creativity and genius, it brings with it not only the spirit of elitism, when the ideals of justice and equality before the law, glorified by the Enlightenment, give way to the doctrine of hierarchy, but also the cult of strength. In the 20th century, there are attempts to overcome not only the psychologism of the philosophy of life and give a new justification for intuition, devoid of irrationalistic pathos (Husserl's phenomenology), but also its characteristic pantheism, for which there is no being open to a transcendental principle. The philosophy of life is being replaced by existentialism and personalism, the understanding of a person as an individual is replaced by an understanding of him as a person.