(1821 - 1881) - writer, publicist, one of the ideological leaders of soil movement. He developed his philosophical, religious, psychological ideas mainly in his works of art. Had a significant impact on the development of Russian religious philosophy late XIX- the beginning of the 20th century, and in more late time and Western philosophical thought, especially existentialism.
As an existential thinker, he was concerned about the relationship between God and man, between God and the world. According to Dostoevsky, a person cannot be moral outside the idea of God, outside religious consciousness. Man, according to him, is great mystery: there is nothing more significant than a person, but there is nothing more terrible. For: man is an irrational being striving for self-affirmation, that is, for freedom.
But what is freedom for man? This is the freedom to choose between good (life "according to God") and evil (life "according to the devil"). The question is whether a person himself, guided purely by human foundations to determine what is good and what is evil. According to Dostoevsky, by embarking on the path of denying God, a person deprives himself of moral guide, and his conscience "may stray to the most immoral": there is no God, there is no sin, there is no immortality, there is no meaning of life. Whoever loses faith in God inevitably takes the path of self-destruction of the personality, like the heroes of his novels - Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, Ivan Karamazov, Kirillov, Stavrogin.
But in the reasoning of the Grand Inquisitor ("The Brothers Karamazov"), the thought is carried out: the freedom preached by Christ and human happiness are incompatible, for only a few can endure the freedom of choice strong-willed personality. All the rest will prefer bread to freedom, wealth. Once free, people will immediately look for someone to bow down to, to whom to give the right to choose and to whom to make responsible for it, since "peace ... is more precious to a person than freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil." Therefore, freedom is possible only for the elect, who, having taken responsibility, will manage a huge mass of weak-minded people.
Yes, real story really doesn't match the high Christian ideal, but the view of humanity offered by the Grand Inquisitor is essentially anti-Christian, containing "disguised contempt for him." In fact, choosing evil, each person acts quite freely and consciously, he knows whom he serves - God or Satan. This often brings Dostoevsky's heroes to the brink mental disorders, to the appearance of "twins", personifying their sick conscience.
In essence, the image of the Grand Inquisitor personifies Dostoevsky's idea of a godless socialist structure of society ("the devil's idea"), for which the main landmark is the forcible unity of mankind on the basis and in the name of the universal material well-being without taking into account the spiritual origin of man. To atheistic Western socialism, Dostoevsky counterposes the idea of an all-unifying Russian socialism, which is based on the thirst of the Russian people for a universal, all-people, all-brotherly association.
One of the first versions of existential philosophy was developed in Russia by N.A. Berdyaev (1871-1948), who is called the "philosopher of freedom"; Existentialism - a philosophical doctrine that analyzes a person's experience of his existence (existence) in the world.
Developing his teaching, Berdyaev took the philosophy German classics, as well as the religious and moral searches of V.S. Solovieva, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.F. Fedorov. His main works: "The Philosophy of Freedom", "The Meaning of Creativity", "The Philosophy of Inequality", "The Meaning of History", "The Philosophy of the Free Spirit", "The Russian Idea", "The Fate of Russia", "The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism", "Self-Knowledge " and etc.
The main feature of the philosophical teachings of Berdyaev is his dualism, i.e. the idea of the internal split, the split of the world and man. According to him, everything is based on two principles: the spirit, which finds expression in freedom, the subject, creativity, and nature, which finds expression in necessity, materiality, the object.
Initially, there is only one inseparable being, in which the subject and object merge - irrational, groundless freedom, which is comprehended as a fact of mystical experience and in which the Birth of God takes place (Berdyaev: "Freedom is more primary than being").
Man, having received creative freedom from God, "fallen away" from him through the fall, through the desire to establish his world as the only one. As a result, he (a person), following the path of "evil" creativity, plunged into the realm of unfreedom - the social realm of mechanical collectives (state, nation, class, etc.), where he loses his individuality, the ability for free creative self-affirmation. As a result, human consciousness is objectified, i.e. determined and suppressed by the massiveness, heaviness of the world, subject to circumstances.
Therefore, says Berdyaev, our life bears the stamp of unfreedom, which is revealed to man by his suffering ("I suffer, therefore I exist"). A person turns out to be internally bifurcated in his existence: he has a genuine “I” (spiritual, divine - an impulse to freedom; determined “from within”) and an inauthentic “I” (social, impersonal, objective).
However, man has hope - in God, who "descends" into social history Christ. The appearance of Christ, says Berdyaev, transforms negative (creativity against God) freedom into positive (creativity in the name of God and together with God) freedom. But the outcome of the struggle between these two aspirations (freedoms) depends on the person.
The affirmation of "positive freedom" will mean, according to Berdyaev, the onset of an existential (creative) time, when the dialectical unity of the divine and the human is affirmed in history, and man in his free creativity becomes like God. As a result, the social world is being transformed on the basis of "catholicity" or "community". By this, Berdyaev understood the religious variety of collectivism, worked out by Russian advanced life and the philosophical culture of Russia, coming from the Slavophiles. It is here that a person will cease to be only a means (“dung”) for future progress (future generations) and will turn into something valuable in itself (everyone is equal before God), into a free creative individuality.
The philosopher contrasted such an ideal society with both Russian socialism and Western soulless individualistic civilization (“Socialism and capitalism are two forms of slavery of the human spirit to the economy”).
The "Russian idea" in Berdyaev's work also bears the stamp of dualism. According to him, a split, dualism passes through Russian history. Russian history is discontinuous and catastrophic. Through social catastrophes (riots, wars, revolutions - "the fate and cross of Russia"), every time it is born as if new Russia(Kyiv Rus. Rus of times Tatar-Mongol yoke, Moscow Russia, Petrovskaya Rus', Soviet Russia which will become a thing of the past when the Russian people realize the religious essence of their character). Here each period is opposed to the other.
This corresponds to the split within Russia: between society (the people) and the state, within the church, between the intelligentsia and the people, within the intelligentsia ("Slavophiles-Westernizers"). dual also Russian culture and nature of the Russian people, in which feminine(humility, renunciation, compassion, pity, inclination to slavery) and male(violence, rebelliousness, cruelty, love of freethinking) beginnings form the basis of the Russian soul, in no way knowing measure: natural, pagan elements and Orthodox humility.
These contradictions, according to N. Berdyaev, are connected with the fact that in Russia two streams of world history collide and come into interaction: East and West. But on the whole, the Russian people were not the people of that culture, which is based on rational, orderly, averaged Western European principles. He is a people of extremes, inspirations and revelations. And, nevertheless, Berdyaev believes, Russia will overcome its dualism, merging into space time, the kingdom of God, which is affirmed on Earth in the form of "catholicity" ("community").
L. I. Shestov (1866 - 1938), close to Berdyaev in his existential-personalistic frame of mind, in his works “The Apotheosis of Groundlessness”, “Athens and Jerusalem”, etc. substantiates the idea of tragic absurdity human existence; puts forward the image of a doomed person - a subject immersed in a world of chaos, the dominance of the elements, chance.
Philosophizing, in his opinion, should come from the subject, focusing not on thinking, reason (ration), but on the experience of existence with its world of deeply personal truths.
Philosophical speculation, i.e. he contrasts the rationalistic "spirit of Athens" with revelation, trust in the foundations of life, which have a Divine source ("the spirit of Jerusalem"). In general, Shestov draws the main conclusion for his system - true philosophy follows from the fact that God exists.
The work of another idealist philosopher V. V. Rozanov (1856 - 1919), conditionally comparable with existentialism, is distinguished by great originality and literary brilliance (works: “People moonlight”, “Fallen leaves”, “Solitary”, etc.). Criticizing orthodox Christianity for its asceticism and "genderless", but believing in God at the level of intuition, he affirmed the religion of sex, love, family as the prime movers of life, the source of human creative energy and the spiritual health of the nation.
Raising the topic of Russia, Rozanov spoke out against the dark, self-destructive principles in Russian nature, including against nihilism, which creates the ground for revolutionary upheavals. In the revolution, he saw only the destruction of national life. Deeply loving Russia, he, at the same time, did not accept not only the revolution of 1917, but also the idea of a socialist state of Russian society.
September 25, 2015 in the city of Alma-Ata in the publishing house "SunSam" was published A new book Alexandra Kan, the final collection of essays entitled "Motherland", timed to coincide with the upcoming 55th anniversary of the author. The book includes 21 essays by the writer, written by him from 1990 to 2015. Here is what the annotation to the collection says.
“The final book “RODINA” contains almost all the works of Alexander Kahn in the essay genre, in which the writer for the first time in the history of the Koreans of the CIS formulated critical issues diaspora consciousness and historical memory, introduced the concept of ethnic existentialism, and also paved the way for Koryo Saram to acquire a true identity in the globalized world of the 21st century through his research.
The book consists of the following works, which became widely known after publication:
- Return home (About the complex of a foreigner and the pinpoint consciousness of Soviet Koreans);
It should be noted that a significant part of these essays was first published on the website of Vladislav Khan "Kore saram: notes about Koreans", the best information and literary publication of the Korean diaspora in the CIS.
And a week later, on October 2, in the studio of Elena Ruzhitskaya, a presentation of the book was held, in the circle of longtime admirers of Kahn's work, his faithful associates and just friends, which naturally turned into lively discussion on the topic. What is the absolute, enduring significance of the writer Alexander Kahn, both in the international, diaspora context, and in the universal human context? We can easily find the answer to the first question in the above annotation and in the book itself, and if we talk about the universal message of the writer, then this question was unexpectedly answered by the author himself.
“When I read biographies of various writers,” said Alexander Kahn, one fact always strikes me. Why did they often live so miserably, miserably, unhappily? And one day I realized what I want and must, especially in the context of our dramatic Korean history, to prove to the whole world, with their experience, professional and life, that the writer deserves to live happily.
Notice why my book is called "Motherland"? That is, it is called such a word and concept, which for us, Koreans, is rather a metaphor and metaphysics. Because the writers of Kore Saram found their homeland precisely in creativity! And accordingly, in their literature, they were as happy as ever on earth! And now, on the eve of my anniversary, I want to responsibly declare that it was through writing that I found peace in my soul, harmony in life, light in creativity and, in fact, the meaning of my destiny, that is, everything that I lacked so much when I lived outside of literature. In other words, I affirm that, it would seem, such an ephemeral substance as Literature is really capable of saving a person from hardships of life, cruel losses, vile betrayals and spiritual corrosion. For this, friends, I propose to raise, literally and figuratively speaking, our glasses!”
Thus, with light hand hero of the occasion, a serious discussion turned into a fun - flying! - a friendly feast that lasted until dawn, where everyone drank to literature as salvation and, in general, to the salvation of the soul. It remains to add that the collection of essays was published at the initiative of the daughter of the writer Ekaterina Kan, in a publishing house headed by Timofey Kim, who had already published Alexander Kan's book "The Shaman Found" in 2003.
This book, as you know, was enthusiastically received by philologists, philosophers, writers, Korean scholars in the professional world, and stories, essays and a screenplay from it were translated and published in America, Germany, France, Sweden and the Republic of Korea. Let's wish a happy fate and the new book of Alexander Kahn, summing up a certain result of his fruitful activity! Namely, so that his “Motherland”, overcoming space and time, finds a homeland already in Eternity itself, or, in other words, gains immortality.
Ecology of knowledge: Viktor Frankl - Man in search of meaning. The collection includes the works of the author, which highlight issues important to everyone: the meaning of life and death, love and suffering, freedom and responsibility
1. Albert Camus - Plague
In the novel-parable "Plague" in the city fictional by the author comes terrible disease- plague. But the fathers of the city, hiding the truth from people, make all the inhabitants hostages of the epidemic. Any biased reader can easily detect the similarity of the situation in the novel with tragic events in France during the Nazi occupation.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism is humanism
The book "Existentialism is Humanism" was first published in France in 1946 and has since gone through several editions. It introduces the reader in a popular form to the main provisions of the philosophy of existentialism and, in particular, to the worldview of Sartre himself.
3. Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
The collection includes the author's works, which highlight issues important to everyone: the meaning of life and death, love and suffering, freedom and responsibility, humanism and religion, etc. great attention in the collection is devoted to the issues of psychotherapy.
4. Simone de Beauvoir - Lovely Pictures
"I always had a need to talk about myself ... The first question that always arose for me was this: what does it mean to be a woman? I thought that I would immediately answer it. But as soon as I took a closer look at this problem, and I realized, first of all, that this world is made for men…" - this is how Simone de Beauvoir wrote about herself, a classic of feminist literature, whose female and creative life flowed alongside the great Jean-Paul Sartre, but not in the shadow of Sartre.
5. Irvin Yalom - Looking into the sun. Life without fear of death
This book is a new bestseller by the famous American psychotherapist and writer Irvin Yalom. The topic raised in this book is sharp and painful, it is rarely brought up for open discussion. But all people have the fear of death in one form or another, it’s just that usually we try to get thoughts about the finiteness of our life out of our heads, not to think, not to remember about it.
Now you have in your hands a very effective tool to combat the fear of death. This book teaches to understand and accept the conditions of human existence and fully enjoy every minute of life. Despite the seriousness of the topic, the book captures and captivates thanks to the skill of a great storyteller - Dr. Irvin Yalom.
6. Alberto Moravia - Boredom
One of the most famous works European existentialism, which literary scholars rightly compare with the "Outsider" Albert Camus. Boredom corrodes lyrical hero famous novel Moravia from the inside, deprives him of the will to act and to live, the ability to seriously love or hate, but at the same time it removes him from the chaos of the world around him, helping to avoid many mistakes and illusions. The author does not impose on us a relationship to the character, offering to draw conclusions from what we have read. However, the writer does not notice the moral right to "dissimilarity" with others for his hero.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke - Notes by Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke - one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, was born in Prague, where he spent his childhood and youth, lived in Berlin, Paris, Switzerland. R. M. called Russian culture the basis of his life perception and experience. He visited Russia twice, knew Leo Tolstoy and Repin, corresponded with Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva. world fame the poet was brought his collections `Book of Images`, `Book of Hours`, `New Poems` and others. However, poetry and prose competed on equal terms in Rilke's work. `Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge`, included in this book, are his most significant prose work. In this whimsical stained-glass novel describing `everyday horror` everyday life, Rilke anticipated the artistic discoveries of existentialist literature by more than thirty years.
8. Ronald Lang - Split "I"
The author, a professional psychiatrist who followed courses of traditional psychotherapy, is perhaps the most rebellious figure in contemporary English psychology. He not only calls for "learning from a schizophrenic", who, in his understanding, becomes a "guide" to other states of consciousness that are closed to the "everyday person" - but also organizes one of the world's first "alternative clinics" for psychotic patients, where he achieves serious success in their cure. In "The Divided Self" he makes an attempt not only to state his views on psychiatry, but to make the reader feel inner world schizophrenic, paradoxical and logical at the same time.
The immediate founders of existentialism are German philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), K. Jaspers (1883-1969); French philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), Albert Camus (1913-1960).
Martin Heidegger, attached to the analysis of the meaning of the category of being, defines being as the existence of things in time. Thus, he laid the foundation for existential philosophy.
The thinker denotes the existence of a person by the term “dasein”, which means the existence of consciousness. Only man knows about his mortality, and only he knows the temporality of his existence. Because of this, he is able to realize his being.
A person, getting into the world and being present in it, experiences a state of care. It appears as a unity of three moments: “being-in-the-world”, “running ahead” and “being-with-in-the-world-existing”. To be an existential being, Heidegger believed, means to be open to the knowledge of beings.
The structure of care, as it were, unites the past, the future and the present. Moreover, Heidegger's past appears as abandonment, the present as doomed to be enslaved by things, and the future as a “project” that affects us. Depending on the priority of one of these elements, being can be authentic or inauthentic.
“Inauthentic being is the world of 'manns'. This is the world of ordinary human existence. This is the world of rumors and ambiguity, the world of vanity, the world of the prosaic struggle for existence, mouse fuss and "cockroach" races. This is a world where a person is engaged in the implementation of a career, love, friendship, all kinds of hobbies. And all this is intended to disguise the true being of a person, which is revealed to him only in extreme situations, called "jaspers". Only in the face of irreversible death does a person discover his own true being, which is existence. The content of existence is the absolute freedom of man. But from the point of view of common sense, absolute freedom looks like complete absurdity. Freedom from natural laws turns out to be nothing but the freedom of suicide. This is how Heidegger understands this question. According to Heidegger, death is the hieroglyph of freedom. Suicide is the highest manifestation of human freedom, hence the famous Heideggerian “freedom for death” (2).
In general, the ideas of the thinker are an attempt to overcome the shortcomings of the old philosophy and find ways to solve the problems of human survival.
In addition to Heidegger, he had a decisive influence on existentialism K. Jaspers. He sought to combine the ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with the tradition of academic philosophy, but without accepting either Kierkegaard's "fanaticism", Nietzsche's "frenzy", or the "indifferent thinking" of university professors.
The specificity of Jaspers' existentialism comes through in his doctrine of "boundary situations", which subsequently served as the basis for the defense of "cultural-psychological value". According to Jaspers, the true meaning of being is revealed in a person only at moments of the deepest life upheavals (illness, death, inexcusable guilt, etc.). It is during these periods that the "collapse of the cipher" occurs: a person is freed from the burden of his everyday worries (from "existing being-in-the-world") and from his ideal interests and scientific ideas about reality (from "transcendental being-in-itself"). Before him opens the world of his deeply intimate existence ("illumination of existence") and his true experiences of God (transcendent).
The main theme of Jaspers's teachings is man and history as the original dimension of human existence. Unlike the natural sciences, history studies a person, and therefore the methods of study are also different. In order to understand history, it is necessary to be aware of what man is; in turn, human existence is revealed through time, through historicity. It is substantiated by the idea of "axial time" - the heyday of ancient and oriental cultures. According to Jaspers, the idea of unity operates in history, but the complete unification of mankind will never be completed.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a writer. His literary and philosophical works, starting with the novel "Nausea" (1938), are permeated with the ideas of existentialism. The humanity of existentialism according to Sartre, first of all, lies in the fact that this doctrine does not consider a person as an object, therefore, does not put him on a par with inanimate objects. According to Sartre, a person cannot be defined for the simple reason that initially he is nothing. He becomes a man, passing the distance of life and stuffing bumps on a thorny path. At the same time, it “creates itself” with the help of such tools as desire and will. Sartre called this subjectivity, thanks to which man rises above the rest of nature. The French thinker was an atheist, so the slogan "Man is the king of nature" is not at all alien to him.
A reasonable person acquires his essence only in the process of life, and therefore bears full responsibility for the "uselessly lived years."
Sartre conveys this idea very vividly and figuratively as a writer. Only in contrast to philosophical works, in his literary works, morality and politics are experimental testing grounds. Already in "Nausea" the writer seeks to convincingly prove that the world is not filled with meaning, and our "I" is simply aimless. Only through an act of consciousness and choice, "I" is able to give the world meaning and value: "Life acquires meaning if we ourselves give it to it" (6, p. 71).
As for morality, here the French thinker also could not overcome his individualism. While extolling the freedom of man, Sartre did not give a clear answer to the question: what to do with this freedom?
Gabriel Marcel wrote big number essays on this topic. According to Marcel, a person is an "embodied being", who, realizing his incarnation, feels the mystical connection of the spirit with the body.
“Existential philosophizing inevitably implies awareness of oneself as an embodied, bodily subject “captive” to space and time. For a person, Marcel believed, an ontological need is characteristic - the need to be. This existential being is attainable through concentration, the main objective which lies in the mystical comprehension of the Presence of God. According to Marcel, the only way out of a closed existential state is to know God, to feel one's connection with Him. This knowledge does not occur rationally, but through a personal mystical encounter with God. In comprehending the Mystery of being and gaining the Presence of God lies for a person the opportunity to conquer time and death. It is not rational theories that speak of the Presence of God, but the evidence of the very life of a person who gains faith and renounces the external world and its values ”(4, p. 116).
His principled focus on personal religious experience made dogmatic principles unnecessary, which led to the condemnation of existentialism in the Catholic Church.
Albert Camus does not raise the question of being in general, unlike Heidegger and Jaspers. Camus leaves being aside and focuses on the problem of meaning. What's the point? Human life, history, individual existence.
His views are developed in conditions when faith in God is lost, and it became clear that human existence is finite in the absolute sense, i.e., that the individual is waiting for complete annihilation, absolute nothingness.
In this situation, the conclusion suggests itself that there is no objective meaning human life No, because there is no one to give her this meaning. Indeed, for Camus, as for existentialism in general, the starting point is the individual. This philosophy, as we know, is imbued with the deepest individualism and subjectivism.
According to Camus, man initially appears in his absolute loneliness and finiteness. But if a person is lonely and goes to his inevitable and absolute end, then what sense of his existence can we talk about at all?
The main thesis of the philosopher is that human life is essentially meaningless. Most people live their petty worries, joys and do not give their lives a purposeful meaning. Those who fill life with meaning, sooner or later understand that ahead (where they go with all their might) is death, Nothing. Everyone is mortal - both those who fill life with meaning and those who do not.
The principle of the absurd is the initial postulate of Camus's concept. Camus gives two main proofs of the absurdity, groundlessness of life: contact with death - with it, much that previously seemed important to a person loses its relevance and seems meaningless; contact with the surrounding world, nature - a person is helpless in front of nature that has existed for millions of years.
Camus sees only 2 ways out of the alienated state of absurdity: Camus riot- this is actually a rebellion against reason, a struggle to debunk it, since reason is not able to comprehend the world. This is, first of all, the struggle of man for his human dignity. Pointing to suicide, he immediately rejects it, because. it is a cry of despair that is unable to break through the wall of the absurd. As a result, the meaning of life, according to Camus, is not in the external world (successes, failures, relationships), but in the very existence of a person.
“Existential philosophy is the philosophy of human being” (Jaspers K. Spiritual situation of time). For a deep knowledge of himself and the world around him, a person must be "in the face of death." Existential novels are riddled with phobias, a sense of hopelessness and despair.
Jean-Paul Sartre is the founder of existentialism, each of his works is an attempt to open "existential insight" in readers. The novel Nausea is diary entries Antoine. Main character long years traveled the world, but never found anything exciting in other countries. Now leads sedentary life. Antoine owns an excellent library and reads a lot. But the world without sensuality begins to drive him crazy. The protagonist reflects, describes in his diary the search for himself. Antoine is convinced that he has found the truth. But what is truth for him?
Happy Death by Albert Camus
The novel was published after the death of the great father of existentialism. The pen test of a novice writer is deep, philosophical work about the purpose of "happiness" in being. According to Camus, a person in search of happiness cannot try on the soullessness of the world around him. This is how desperation is born.
Boredom by Alberto Moravia
After the war, the artist Dino is disappointed in life, he seems to be trying to "find himself", but in fact he turns into a madman. Moravia deprived his hero of the ability to feel (love and even hate). The artist Dino exists outside the outside world. But what will it lead to?
"Castle" Franz Kafka
The novel captivates with an exciting plot from the first pages. The protagonist K. arrived in the role of a land surveyor in a certain Village, but he does not have permission to enter the Castle to carry out work. K. strives to get into the Castle, but due to bureaucratic requirements and life's troubles, he is increasingly moving away from his goal.
Lovely Pictures by Simone de Beauvoir
This novel is the confession of a young woman. Her life at first glance is wealthy and ideal - her husband ( famous architect), well-behaved children, passionate lover, prestigious job. But the woman feels deeply unhappy, will she be able to change her life?
“If people commit suicide…then there is something worse than death. That's why it creeps to the bone when you read about suicide: it's not the skinny corpse hanging on the window grate that is terrible, but what happened in the heart a moment before that.
Echo of Heaven by Kenzaburo Oe
Japanese existential novel from Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe. main character— charming Marie Kuraki, who faces serious life's trials associated with her children. Has Marie found salvation for herself? The novel is philosophical, permeated with existential motifs and mythological allusions.
