The problem of dehumanization. Ticket Humanism and threats of dehumanization in modern culture

What is dehumanization

The idea that a person is at the center of the universe, his life is the highest value, and he himself has the right to independently determine the form and content of his own life, began to take shape at the end of the Middle Ages and was finally established in the Enlightenment, when the accelerated economic, political and cultural processes rapidly shaped the appearance of what would later be called Modern. The key is the concept of progress, indicating the progressive development of society, which abandons old prejudices and, on rational grounds, changes itself, adapting to the Human capital letter freeing him from the burden of the past, improving legislation, improving the material conditions of his life.

The illusions of a great era of progress began to crumble already in the 19th century: for example, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, figures so important to the findesiècle, had no special illusions about human nature, and the realist writers who castigated social vices were by no means always optimistic about the future. Culturally big role played by Darwinism, positivism and psychoanalysis that arose in the second half of the 19th century - they destroyed humanistic illusions and represented man no longer as the crown of creation, intelligent and life-changing in better side, but a blind-sighted animal, which is led by base instincts, gross desires and the struggle for survival. The massacre of the First World War with its millions of dead put an end to this story: what kind of humanism can we talk about when weapons of mass destruction are used?

But the catastrophes of the middle of the century, the Holocaust and the Gulag, showed that this is not the limit and dehumanization can reach unprecedented proportions, in comparison with which the savagery and cruelty of archaic societies will seem like a childish prank. The reflection on how humanity could drive itself into such a corner continues to this day, and it is unlikely that it will ever be possible to put a bullet in it: the scale of the crimes committed by people against people is too great. Each generation will have to try to comprehend them again, but already in the 20th century the most important works which allow us to understand the phenomenon of dehumanization, its origins, essence and dark legacy.

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Reception

“The Gutta-Percha Boy” is built on contrast: the author’s intonation is calm, somewhere even everyday, the descriptions are detailed, with many details, they are pleasant to read, but at the same time we are talking about a terrible tragedy.

Key

On the one hand, this text fits perfectly into the tradition humanistic literature XIX century with its attention to the oppressed and disadvantaged; on the other hand, it sounds extremely modern, there is almost no obsessive sentimentality in it, which at that time was perhaps the main code of socio-critical fiction (it is enough to recall at least Dostoevsky and Dickens), but there is a story that any child can easily try on . It is not surprising that Grigorovich's story became a classic of children's literature (although some of its editions are usually published in a greatly abridged form) and to this day remains perhaps the best illustration of how a person is reduced to the state of an animal, thing, instrument.

Context

Grigorovich stood at the origins of noble populism in Russian literature, his most famous works were written in the forties of the XIX century, they deal with the hard life of the peasants. In the sixties he, along with other writers noble origin quarreled with radical raznochintsy (all of them were members of the Sovremennik magazine) and fell silent for a long time: it would take almost twenty years before he again took up the pen and wrote several works, including The Gutta-Percha Boy.

Dmitry Grigorovich. Gutta Percha Boy (1883)

The boy Petya, an orphan, is taken up by the acrobat Becker - Cruel person who speaks bad Russian and treats the child like an animal. Petya has nowhere to go: he has no relatives, and he has to learn difficult and dangerous tricks, endure beatings and humiliation, live in filth and starving. There is almost no one to stand up for him, the clown Edwards sometimes tries to exhort the acrobat Becker, but he himself has long turned into a kind of machine gun, his only task is to make the child an instrument, in front of which the gutta-percha boy will die at the end of the book. The inhumanity of the environment, in no way suitable for any kind of tolerable childhood, is described as follows: “Opening the door, Edwards entered a tiny low room located under the first gallery for spectators; it was unbearable in her from stuffiness and heat; the stable air, heated by the gas, was joined by the smell of tobacco smoke, lipstick and beer; on one side was a mirror in a wooden frame sprinkled with powder; nearby, on the wall, pasted over with wallpaper, bursting through all the cracks, hung a tights that looked like torn human skin.

The author does not give readers the opportunity to get acquainted with the inner world of the protagonist - we understand that he is suffering, but we do not know what his thoughts and feelings really are. In addition to the objectified author's description, we see Petya first through the eyes of a clown who sympathizes with him, but can do little to help (and he himself, in general, is in a very unenviable position), and then through the eyes of children from a noble family who, for good behavior, were allowed to visit circus show. The gutta-percha boy, whose performance the children were waiting for, fails to cope with a difficult number, falls to the floor of the circus and dies. Children are horrified, but adults, their parents, do not show the slightest sympathy: for them, as well as for Becker, Petya is just an attraction, entertainment, and the fact that he did not cope with his functions causes indignation in Count Listomirov: “What -there the scoundrel broke loose ... (the count, apparently, was agitated, because, according to the principle, he never used harsh, vulgar expressions), - some scoundrel broke loose and fell ... what a sight for children !! Hm!! our children especially are so nervous; Vera is so impressionable... She won’t sleep all night now...”

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An emblematic example of dehumanization can be found in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The hobbit Smeagol becomes the owner of the Ring of Omnipotence, and it subordinates him to his will. The hobbit is expelled from his native village, he turns into a miserable, but at the same time evil and dangerous creature, his personality splits, he loses the skills of normal human speech, he refers to himself in the plural, and so on. Although the author writes about imaginary archaic times and traditional society, we understand that in this case we are talking about the dangers that threaten a person of the 20th century - about unlimited power and technology, the most important tools for dehumanization.

William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies (1954) is considered one of the most important texts of the 20th century, and this is not surprising: the problem of dehumanization, the loss of the human, was posed in it with radical sharpness. “Lord of the Flies” is a kind of “Anti-Robinson”: if in Defoe’s novel the hero who has fallen on a desert island brings with him civilization and christian religion, inhabits the wilderness, humanizes the savage, then in Golding's book, during the war, evacuated children end up on the same island, in a short time getting rid of the shackles of civilization and starting to kill each other. The novel is full of biblical symbolism, it reminds us that Cain lives in each of us, who can wake up at any moment, but such a work could only appear after the horrors of World War II.

Hotel Rwanda (2004), which received three Oscar and Golden Globe nominations each, is a film about the 1993 Rwandan genocide. The protagonist, who runs an expensive hotel, and his wife belong to different ethnic groups that are about to start cutting each other. The first murders have already taken place, but the hero, bribing influential people, trying to avert trouble from himself and his family. Meanwhile, with every minute of the film, the price of human life outside the walls of the hotel is becoming less and less.

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Reception

The metaphor and grotesqueness of The Little Demon immediately catches the eye and creates a comical, sometimes frightening effect, but at the same time there is no feeling that you are reading an allegorical work like Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a City: Sologub is fascinated by the very destruction of the human, he does not stage in front of you the tasks to open only one social problems, because of which life in the provinces is so hard and dull.

Key

To create vivid images, Sologub uses the entire symbolist poetic arsenal, sparing no colors. Exaggerations piled on top of each other, imaginary evil spirits and sorceresses, an accentuated longing for another world, a peculiar grammar - all this makes the gray provincial little world look like a terrible fairy tale, which, nevertheless, is not so far from terrible reality, so the reader should carefully follow how phantasmagoria flows into a reflection of reality and vice versa.

Context

Of course, such a work of modernist literature could not have appeared without careful study Western and domestic symbolist ideas, trends and themes (for example, in some episodes one can see Nietzscheanism rethought in the context of modernism), but first of all Sologub relied on his personal experience. He had to work in provincial schools for about ten years before he managed to move to St. Petersburg, so he wrote about what, to his great displeasure, he knew and understood well. According to the author, all the characters in the novel had real prototypes, even Peredonov has a certain teacher, Stakhov, allegedly even more insane than Ardalyon Borisovich himself.

Fedor Sologub. Petty Imp (1902)

A novel about the provincial sadistic teacher Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, one of the most popular works of Russian modernist prose - during the life of Sologub, more than ten editions of the book were published, and today it is still published and read. Perhaps, before The Little Demon, there were no notable novels in Russia whose protagonist could become such a repulsive character (the only exception is Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlevs: Judas Golovlev, without a doubt, Peredonov's direct predecessor): any positive human he is completely devoid of qualities, but all the negative ones are grotesquely (and with great talent) exaggerated by the author. Here is how Sologub describes Peredonov: “His feelings were dull, and his consciousness was a corrupting and deadly apparatus. Everything that reached his consciousness turned into filth and filth. Faults in objects caught his eye and pleased him. […] He did not have favorite objects, just as he did not have favorite people - and therefore nature could only act on his feelings in one direction, only oppress them. Also meeting people. Especially with strangers and strangers, who cannot be said to be rude. To be happy for him meant doing nothing and, shutting himself off from the world, pleasing his womb.

Peredonov is a vicious, envious gossip and paranoid; his only dream is to move up the career ladder, to become an inspector. Careerism is perhaps the only human trait of Ardalyon Borisovich, and the rest of the qualities, thanks to which people manage to get along with each other, he either lost a long time ago, or never had them at all. To call Peredonov a villain does not turn the tongue: he is painfully cowardly, vindictive and petty boor, doing nasty things on the sly (or if he is sure of his complete impunity). In the end, Peredonov reaches complete madness: his second cousin Varvara tricks him into marrying him, assuring him that for this he will get the position of inspector, but the appointment does not come, Peredonov's suspiciousness and obsession grow, and in the finale he finally loses his mind and kills his henchman Volodin, whom the failed inspector considers a werewolf who can turn into a ram.

However, the complete absence of those features that classical humanism praised in a person cannot be called Peredonov's distinguishing feature: practically all the inhabitants of the provincial town where the action takes place are the same petty demons like him, albeit not as bright and inventive.

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At least four more Russian novels are devoted to the transformation of people into non-humans, the action of which also takes place in the provinces: of course, these are “Dead Souls”, “Demons”, the already mentioned “Lord Golovlevs” and similar to “Demons” in subject matter, but completely independent and no less impressive anti-nihilistic novel by Nikolai Leskov "On the Knives". All of them are written in a different context and in a different aesthetics, but they also depict people who have lost or are losing their human qualities and appearance.

"City of Life of Death" (2009) is a relatively unknown Chinese film about one of the most terrible episodes of the Japanese-Chinese war. 1937, Japanese troops enter the capital of China, the city of Nanjing, and a terrible massacre begins, for not a large number of several hundred thousand people perish in weeks. The ability to kill and rape with impunity quickly dehumanizes Japanese soldiers. Chinese prisoners and civilians are no longer people for them, but dolls with which you can do whatever you want.

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Reception

Camus narrates in the first person, so we look at the world through the eyes of a man who has atrophied almost everything human: a rather unusual experience for those who usually worry about relatives, rejoice at the beginning of a new romance and do not shoot around at strangers.

Context

Camus was born and raised in Algeria, his childhood was not easy: his father died in the First World War; mother, a semi-deaf and illiterate Spaniard, earned her living by unskilled labor. Albert himself suffered from tuberculosis, suffered for a long time from the consequences of the disease, due to which, despite all his talents, he could not engage in postgraduate education (he wrote a diploma on the influence of Plotinus's ideas on Blessed Augustine) and as a result never became a professional philosopher. In general, the French writer and thinker had more than enough biographical reasons for assessing the state of contemporary humanity without much optimism. Later, about The Stranger, Camus will say: "I tried to portray in the face of my hero the only Christ we deserve."

Albert Camus. Outsider (1942)

This work is considered to be one of the key texts literary existentialism. A Frenchman by the name of Meursault (we do not know his name) works as a petty clerk and lives in the Algerian suburbs. This is a dispassionate person, living as if half asleep, responding to external stimuli with the simplest reactions: with complete indifference he buries his mother, whom he handed over to an almshouse three years ago, takes a mistress with indifference, and then, for no particular reason, kills an Arab on the beach (due to strong in the heat, his mind becomes cloudy, and he shoots at him, "as if knocking on the door of misfortune with four short blows"). Meursault explains his act in this way - by heat, he is sentenced to death penalty. Only in a prison cell, on the verge of death, an insight descends on him, and Meursault suddenly begins to feel the whole depth of life - as the existentialist philosophers understood it.

However, if we look closely at this character, we will see in him an exemplary depiction of dehumanization (it is difficult to say whether any human values ​​matter to Meursault!), and created when the mass extermination of people in the camps was just looming on the horizon. Camus seems to want to say: look, Western culture, in company with Darwin and Freud, explained to us what a person is like, cleansed of humanistic and metaphysical husks, well, that's what we got in the end - admire. Even the Darwinian struggle for survival is alien to the outsider: the senseless primitive impulses that drive him lead him straight to death.

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A better understanding of the analysis of dehumanization in The Outsider will be helped not by Camus' philosophical essays like The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebellious Man (although they, of course, are also worth reading), but by primary sources: for example, Sigmund Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis (maximum a simple introduction to his theory - lectures given to the general public) and "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin (this work is much longer and more complicated, but a lot has been written about it - it will not be difficult to find a summary).

"Paths of Glory" (1957)

The movie that made Stanley Kubrick famous. World War I; subdivision French army goes to attack the German positions. The offensive was horribly planned, everyone knew that it would end in defeat, but still someone had to blame. Three soldiers are chosen as switchmen, they are judged for a long and painful time, and then they are shot. Man is no longer everyone individual person, but only part of a huge mass in identical overcoats.

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Reception

« Kolyma stories” are written in a kind of “zero” style, without bright tropes and poetic beauties. The author's intonation is emphatically calm and objective. Hysteria has no place in camp literature, Shalamov argued, and his firm, quiet voice throughout the entire collection will never break into a cry, no matter what horrors are discussed.

Key

Shalamov set himself an almost impossible task: to clothe literary form an experience that defies description and analysis. The foundation of his work is the solution of this unsolvable task, which requires the writer to give full dedication and utmost honesty - first of all, to himself.

Context

Shalamov spent in camps in total amount For 22 years, neither before nor after his imprisonment, he did not take an anti-Soviet position, but, unlike Solzhenitsyn, who published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he could not publish Kolyma Tales in the USSR during his lifetime. Even after the death of Stalin, the innocently condemned writer, who lived for many years in inhuman conditions, could not achieve a human attitude towards himself.

Varlam Shalamov. Kolyma stories (1954–1962)

As you know, "Kolyma stories" were written by Shalamov on biographical material. The limiting experience of preserving the human in the conditions of dehumanization is clothed in an artistic form, therefore, “Kolyma Tales” must be read in two optics at once: as the most reliable historical document and how outstanding literary work. Both of these sides, with the author's complete absence of sentimentality and vindictiveness, complement and complicate each other. Shalamov's stories remain a work that dissects dehumanization with unsurpassed accuracy, rigor and artistic power.

In a short note “What I saw and understood in the camp,” Shalamov wrote: “[I saw] the extreme fragility of human culture and civilization. A man became a beast in three weeks - with hard work, cold, hunger and beatings. "Kolyma Tales" is a real encyclopedia of inhumanity: there is no such baseness and meanness that the one who was broken by the camp would not go to.

"Is this a man?" (1946) - famous book Italian and Jewish writer Primo Levi, who was arrested for participating in the Italian anti-fascist movement and spent about a year in Auschwitz (he was liberated by Soviet troops; out of 650 Italian Jews in Auschwitz, only twenty people survived). The main theme of his first work is the transformation of the human into the inhuman; this is the most important book for understanding how dehumanization works: because of the inhumanity of the executioners in the death camps, their victims themselves became inhumane.

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Zimbardo's experiment was commissioned by the US Navy, whose authorities were trying to find out the causes of conflicts in their correctional facilities. The results of the study were reported to the US Department of Justice, which was engaged in bloody riots in some American prisons, and in 2004, when the scandal broke out with the Abu Grave prison - an Iraqi military prison where prisoners were tortured - Zimbardo was on the team of lawyers who defended one of the guards of this prison. institutions (he was sentenced to eight years), and then used the experience of participating in this trial to write the book The Lucifer Effect.

Philip Zimbardo. Lucifer effect. Why Good People Turn into Villains (2007)

In 1971, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University, based on which the book The Lucifer Effect was later written. The essence of the experiment was that the volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners in a "prison" located in the basement of the psychological faculty. Zimbardo, who himself played the role of prison manager, tried to find out how a person reacts to the restriction of freedom and the conditions of prison life - and came to disappointing conclusions. Volunteers quickly got used to their roles: those who played the role of prisoners became weak-willed and submissive, and those who played the role of guards became sadists (although the experiment lasted only six days!). In the shortest period of time, conflicts began between the prisoners and the guards, which the latter began to brutally suppress, and the actions of both of them were not much different from what is happening in real prisons. Soon, the prisoners were forced to wash latrines with their bare hands, deprived of food, and so on - in a word, the conventions of the experiment turned out to be enough for some of the volunteers to be divided by lot, that is, in fact, interchangeable volunteers (and all of them were mentally stable, white and belonged to the middle class) lost its human dignity and became the object of extreme abuse, despite the fact that the guards were strictly forbidden any physical violence. All this indicated that the situation affects people's behavior much more than their personal qualities, and two completely ordinary people, without any special external reasons, can suddenly turn into an executioner and a victim.

How is dehumanization understood?

Studies like those conducted by Zimbardo can tell us a lot about the fragility of the human, about the unreliability of humanistic values ​​and ideals, which in themselves turn out to be inactive - it is enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the tacit consent of society. However, such experiments do not give broad generalizations, they require a different level of reflection, and, of course, Western philosophy of the past two centuries could not bypass this problem.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to come to the conclusion that humanism has suffered a complete collapse, and now a reassessment of all values ​​is coming. His view is pessimistic, and at the same time encouraging: humanity has reached a dead end, but a superman is coming to replace man: “What is a monkey in relation to man? A laughing stock or a painful shame. And man must be the same for the superman: a laughing stock or a painful shame” (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”). The 20th century showed that fears about the strength of old values ​​were fully justified, but nothing good came of the superman: an attempt to renew human nature instead of improved humanism gave the opposite result. At the beginning of the last century, some hoped for the renewal and purification of mankind, others believed that it was not necessary to look for new ones to replace the old humanistic values ​​- it was enough to rid the old ones of the superfluous and re-actualize them, therefore, at the end of the positivist-Darwinist era, a heightened interest in religion suddenly arose, which many considered it a means of patching up holes in humanism - although in the 18th century it was in religious prejudices that the philosophers of the Enlightenment saw the root of all evils, subject to complete destruction.

An interesting attempt to rehabilitate religious humanism was made in the second half of the last century by the anthropologist René Girard. According to his concept, dehumanizing violence, now and then sweeping over different societies in waves, can be stopped with the help of the victim - Girard calls her a scapegoat. The victim is deprived of human traits, excluded from the human collective and destroyed, due to which social tension drops to zero and begins to grow again until it reaches the extreme point - and then everything will repeat itself again. There is a way out of this vicious circle: this is the voluntary sacrifice of Christ, who accepts the torment on the cross, so that violence is stopped, so that there are no more scapegoats - you just need to correctly learn his lessons and teachings. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben thinks a lot about exclusion and rejection: in his program work “HomoSacer. Sovereign power and bare life," he argues that under the guise of parliamentary democracy, there is always the possibility of introducing a state of emergency, suspending the right and subjecting a person to exclusion, reducing him to the state of "bare life" - and therefore the basis contemporary politics is not a city, but a concentration camp.

The catastrophe of the middle of the 20th century forced many European intellectuals to look at the problem of dehumanization in a new way. Of course, their main thought was that something like this should never happen again, but a rigorous analysis of causes and effects led to a very non-trivial conclusion: dehumanization is based on Western humanism itself, a hierarchical system of values ​​that has accumulated so many contradictions over the centuries that in the end she turned into her own opposite. The only logical conclusion from this analysis was that traditional metaphysics and hierarchical thinking should be completely destroyed, which subordinates a person to dead abstractions and, for the sake of certain ideals, allows one part of society to turn another into non-humans. In a word, it was an attempt to knock out a wedge with a wedge, to oppose real dehumanization to intellectual dehumanization, shifting the focus from a person (who has turned from the center of the universe into a constructed object, easily vulnerable and amenable to manipulation) to sign systems and practices that completely determine the existence of a person, his identity, its values ​​and social relations. It is difficult to say how productive this project was (the greatest contribution was made by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and other French thinkers): perhaps it is thanks to him that humanity still maintains a delicate balance and does not fall into the abyss of complete dehumanization.

Other books about dehumanization

The diary of a Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp, which she kept in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, is one of the most terrible and reliable evidence of dehumanization of the 20th century.

Jean Amery - Austrian writer, member of the Resistance. For anti-Nazi propaganda, he was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, spent almost two years in concentration camps. After the war, he was released, changed his name, remaking it in the French manner (the real name of the writer is Hans Mayer), and for a long time refused to set foot on German soil, write in German and talk about the camp experience. In 1966, his work “Beyond Crime and Punishment” was published - one of the most important books about the Holocaust: Amery tries to outline ways in it for creating a new humanism, starting from the figure of a Jewish prisoner who is doomed to destruction.

The famous Austrian psychologist and psychotherapist, the creator of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, was also a concentration camp prisoner. In the camp he provided psychological help prisoners, prevented suicide. Frankl's seminal work is called Man's Search for Meaning, in which he talks about his experiences of surviving in the camp and explains how to find meaning in life, even if he finds himself in such monstrous and inhuman conditions.

The fact that classical literature is a stronghold of humanism is already taught to us at school. However, in various works of art, we are faced not only with high humanistic ideals, but also with their direct opposite - inhumanity. Gorky talks about what dehumanization is, using the books of Grigorovich, Sologub, Shalamov and others as an example.

Dehumanization of culture in the context of cultural global studies

The social situation in the world at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century is characterized by a systemic crisis: unemployment, inflation, rising prices, and the loss of most of the social guarantees. Many researchers state the reorientation of public consciousness from collectivist to individual, from self-improvement and creation to enrichment. The principle of permissiveness in the pursuit of personal well-being, extreme individualism, adventurism, the cult of power and money is actively introduced into the public consciousness by the media, propaganda.
And this process is actively developing, which leads to the transformation of the individual into a "one-dimensional person" (G. Marcuse).
“The state of crisis,” K. Jaspers noted, “causes a change in the “I”, an understanding consciousness, which draws us into the cycle of continuous overcoming, losses and gains, in which we experience painful fragmentation, we strive to remain active in that area at least for a while. which, although limited, is subject to us.
Since the implementation of such a policy has a destructive effect on the entire internal appearance of a person, erodes the fundamental spiritual values ​​of the individual, leads to the degradation of new generations, regressive phenomena in society as a whole, the author of the article decided to subject these processes to socio-philosophical analysis, choosing as a study the culturological direction of globalistics .
The culturological direction of global studies is characterized by a broader view of the genesis global problems. Philosophical globalistics today is a science about the incessant changes of mankind, about its constant and inevitable adaptation to new conditions of existence - material, moral, religious, intellectual. The science of those correspondences, of that balance, which in all epochs is automatically established between different and simultaneous conditions human being: material conditions, technical conditions, spiritual conditions.
The dehumanization of culture can be called the main reason for the aggravation of global problems. The solution to the current crisis is seen in the return of genuine humanism, where a person will be responsible for his being.
Under the crisis, the author, like Aristotle, understands the structural changes in the development of society. Even Hesiod (VIII century BC) in the poem "Works and Days" considered the history of people as a process of steady deterioration in human living conditions. Namely: from the "golden age" through the "silver" and "bronze" to the "iron age", which was associated with the contemporary period. If in the "Golden Age" people lived, as it were, "not knowing grief, not knowing labors", then in the "Iron Age" they were left with "only one serious, cruel misfortune."
After many centuries, J.-J. Rousseau (1712-1778) revived, in essence, ideas about the crisis of the development of civilization - from its "natural state", where there were harmonious relations between people, to the state of "inequality among people". It was private property that he considered as the main reason social inequality in society.
In the 20th century, the status of ideas, according to which Western civilization is approaching a state of crisis, is increasing. These ideas were especially strengthened between the I and II World Wars.
Their genesis is associated with the work of O. Spengler "The Decline of Europe" (V.1, 1918; V.2, 1922). According to his ideas, European culture, being a "living organism", like any other culture, is doomed to "old age, decay and death". Degradation European culture expressed in its transformation into civilization. Civilization is the completion and outcome of culture, it follows "...becoming as it has become, life as death, development as numbness" . The form of this culture is the "petrified world city".
If O. Spengler offers a culturological analysis of the crisis of European type civilization, then E. Husserl (1859-1938) offers a philosophical one. In the work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy”, written by him at the end of his life, it is argued that the rejection of the universality of the cognitive process and the absolutization of rationalism as a principle of science is a form of expression of the “life crisis of European humanity” .
It is no coincidence that, speaking during Sunday mass on January 8, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI compared modern Europe with the Roman Empire during its decline.
“The modern era,” G. Le Bon wrote, “is one of such critical moments when human thought is preparing for change. Two main factors underlie this change. The first is the destruction of the religious, political and social beliefs that gave rise to all the elements of our civilization; the second is the emergence of new conditions of existence and completely new ideas, which were the result of modern discoveries in the field of science and industry.
Modern human thought carefully considers the historical milestones of the collapse of civilization, the tragic turning points due to which historical development took place. The philosopher of the "Silver Age" S. Frank analyzing the course historical development in his work “The Spiritual Foundations of Society” writes: “Under the influence of these historical events, or even, perhaps, independently of them and partly even before them, due to some inexplicable internal evolution of spiritual life, something happened that we simply state here as an indisputable fact: the collapse of faith - which until recently had the meaning of axiological certainty in progress, in the unceasing improvement of man, in the continuous victory of light over darkness, predetermined by the very structure of the world and man. The task of overcoming world evil is painfully difficult - not only is its favorable outcome not predetermined, but the very understanding of its meaning and essence is changing.
Disbelief in the dominant force of good can be designated, according to the exact definition of S. Frank, as a crisis of human faith - "as a crisis of humanism."
Russian religious philosopher V. Zenkovsky at the beginning of the 20th century prophetically wrote about the danger of a deep spiritual breakdown that follows in response to Western cultural influence: “The secularization of culture, the emergence of a number of independent and independent spheres of creativity lead to a rupture of integrity in the individual, the extreme development of technical civilization, an unprecedented flowering of the mechanical side, internal contradictions capitalism and the formidable growth of social struggle, the development of mammonism, the weakening of spiritual life and the direct growth of pluralism, and at the same time the high development of individualism, the growth of individual demands and the inevitable increase in loneliness. ... All this, taken together, paints a picture of a real formidable process ... ".
Many challenges and threats of the 21st century are associated with the degradation of human spirituality and the international community as a whole. It is postulated by many famous scientists and public figures different countries of the world. Lack of spirituality is the defining dominant of many challenges and threats hanging over the fate of mankind. Waves of aggression, terrorism, violence, violation of international law in the XX-XXI centuries swept through different regions of the world and affected the states of the world community.
The ecological crisis of the Earth, socio-economic and other global crises of the planet, in the first place, are associated with the general degradation of the spirituality of modern civilization and man, in particular. Despite the significant experience of creating a personality in all religions of the world, certain efforts in this direction by many progressive public and religious figures, spirituality does not take its rightful place in the concepts of development of various states, international relations, the development of scientific and technical progress, Everyday life of people. This is clearly seen in the media: television, newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasting, as well as in film production, theater, music, stage, architecture, sculpture, painting, etc. word in all spheres of spiritual culture.
The great Russian philosopher V. Solovyov wrote about the destructive power of individualism back in the 19th century: “The excessive development of individualism in the modern West leads to its opposite - to general depersonalization and attitude. The extreme tension of personal consciousness, not finding an appropriate object for itself, turns into empty and petty egoism, which equalizes everyone.
One of the first researchers of culture who showed that the current crisis of culture cannot be compared with the previous ones was the outstanding Dutch philosopher J. Huizinga. His treatise “In the shadow tomorrow” (1935), subtitled “The Diagnosis of the Spiritual Illness of Our Age,” J. Huizinga begins with an apocalyptic premonition: this poor ... civilization stupid and insane, because the motors would continue to rotate, and the banners would fly, but the human spirit would disappear forever. He is seized by fear of the future and a tragic feeling of death threatening a person. Everything that seemed unshakable and sacred is tottering - truth and humanity, law and reason, state institutions and production systems cease to function. The progressive decay and decline of culture has become a wake-up call for an increasing number of people to recognize. Tangled knots of problems are growing everywhere: the fate of national minorities, drawn borders, unthinkable economic conditions of life. Any of these situations is experienced on the verge of bitterness, turning them into many foci, ready to ignite at any moment, notes J. Huizinga.
In past eras, crises repeatedly arose: tremors, displacement of layers and tidal waves were no less destructive than they are today. However, there was no sense of impending collapse of the entire civilization. Many see the overcoming of the crisis of culture in the revival of the past, a return to former perfection. J. Huizinga is ironic about this approach. Old wisdom, old virtue create only the illusion of renewal. If we want to preserve culture, J. Huizinga believes, we must continue its creation. Only by constantly moving forward into the stormy sea of ​​uncertainty can one find a way out of the crisis. This does not mean forgetting the past, for a sound spirit is not afraid to take with him on the road a weighty load of former values.
For creative activity, it is important to understand the meaning and purpose of culture. In the chapter "Basic Conditions of Culture" Huizinga names three essential features that are necessary for the formation of the phenomenon called culture.
First, culture requires a certain balance of spiritual and material values. This means that the various spheres of cultural activity, each separately, but within the framework of the whole, realize the most effective life function. Harmony is manifested in the order, the powerful articulation of parts, the style and rhythm of the life of a given society. Each assessment of the cultural state of the people is determined by an ethical and spiritual measure. Culture cannot be high if it lacks mercy.
Secondly, every culture contains a certain aspiration. Culture is a focus on the ideal of society. This ideal can be different: spiritual and religious; glorification of honor, nobility, honor, power, economic wealth and prosperity; praising health. These aspirations are perceived as good, they are protected by public order and are fixed in the culture of society.
And, thirdly, - domination over nature.
Based on these features, Huizinga defines culture as a certain position of society, where the subordination of nature is based and promotes a harmonious balance between spiritual and material values, and society itself cultivates and serves an ideal based on metaphysical ideas. The concept of J. Huizinga is interesting in that he was the first of the researchers of culture to show that the current crisis of culture cannot be compared with the previous ones. However, what is the main diagnosis of the “spiritual disease of our era”? J. Huizinga notes that a whole range of dangers threatens a culture that is experiencing a period of acute spiritual crisis. The culture is in a state of weakened immunity against infection and intoxication, the spirit is wasted. The meaning of the word falls irresistibly, and indifference to truth grows. “A cloud of verbal garbage hangs over the whole world, like asphalt and gasoline vapors over our cities.” It is no coincidence that the danger of absolutely irresponsible mass actions inspired by slogans, meetings and appeals has increased.
Having named the crisis symptoms of a spiritual illness, the author makes an attempt to present a forecast for the future. True, he makes a reservation that a glance is enough for no more than three steps. The whole perspective is obscured by fog. Today's world cannot return to its former path. In addition, the forecast is hampered by the fact that some signs of the new may not develop at all in the future. Where can you expect salvation?
Science and technology cannot become the foundation of renewal, a new arrangement of social life, streamlining the activities of the state can strengthen the basis of culture, but not cure the crisis, the unification of religions is possible, but not by dictate, but by the voluntary acceptance of a common will. But these are all external factors.
Renewal of the spirit is necessary for recovery. “The inner purification of the individual himself is necessary. The very spiritual habitus (state) of man must change.” The foundations of culture are such that they cannot be laid down or supported by collective entities - be it peoples, states, churches, schools, parties or associations - says J. Huizinga. The good cannot lie in the victory of one state, one people, one race, one class. The world has gone far in its contradictions. “A new culture can be created only by a purified humanity”, which is faced with the task of re-mastering and managing this world, not letting it die in recklessness and self-blindness, but permeating it with spirituality. On this optimistic note, J. Huizinga ends his book on the diagnosis of the spiritual illness of our era.
The notion of a cultural crisis is historical. Using the example of world history, one can show not only the crisis, but also the death of entire cultures. The difference between the current crisis of culture and the crises of past eras is that the current culture is not being replaced by another, higher, more harmonious and more aspiring to high ideals. Moreover, the modern crisis tends to globalize its scale, which leads to a gradual leveling of completely different cultures.
Modern societies are fascinated by the idea of ​​technological progress, only what is new is perceived, and the values ​​of previous eras are rejected as obsolete. As a result of revolutionary changes in the field of information, practically all societies that have risen to high levels of development are drawn into this pursuit of the new.
Not one of the signs by which we have defined culture is not fulfilled at the present time. Instead of a balance between material and spiritual values, we see overproduction, both in the material and intellectual spheres, with continued poverty and unemployment. Modern societies are characterized by the private interests of their groups, which not only do not unite them, but even contradict each other. In his desire to dominate nature, man has surpassed all boundaries of what is permitted. The "rebellious" nature no longer wants to see its master in man, and man is forced to reckon with this.
Pitirim Sorokin in his book "Man and Society in Disaster" emphasized that the period we are experiencing is the time of one of the greatest crises in the history of mankind. Not only war, famine, epidemic and revolution, but many other disasters reigned in the world. All values ​​are broken, all norms are destroyed. Humanity has become a distorted likeness of its own image. An all-encompassing crisis has engulfed almost the entire culture and society, from top to bottom. This crisis, according to Sorokin, penetrates into all forms of social, economic and political organization, into the way of being and thinking.
The great humanist of the twentieth century, A. Schweitzer (1875-1965), who formulated his concept of the purpose and meaning of human history, also stated in his works written after the First World War that modern society is in the deepest crisis. The cause of the crisis is either inattention to culture, or in pessimism, unwillingness to act. To get out of the crisis, humanity must realize that the main objective history - the preservation of culture and the humanization of society. Schweitzer emphasized that the need to preserve humanity and culture seems to be recognized by many people. Strong-willed efforts are needed even in order to affirm the idea of ​​the priority of culture in human history. Schweitzer argued that a commonality of human culture was formed in the 20th century, and the crisis of culture in the 20th century is a crisis of humanity, and not a crisis in Europe, not a crisis in America or Asia. “Those who perceive the present decline as something natural console themselves with the thought that some one culture, and not culture in general, is doomed to decay, and that a new culture of a new race will flourish in a new historical stage. This point of view is wrong. There is no longer a reserve of virgin and potentially gifted peoples left on the globe who, sometime in the future, could replace us as leaders of spiritual life. We know all the peoples living on earth. There is not a single one among them who would not already be involved in our culture in the sense that his fate would not be determined by ours. All of them - capable and incapable, distant and close - are influenced by the forces of lack of culture operating in our culture. All of them are sick with our disease and only together can they recover. Not the culture of one race, but the culture of all mankind, present and future, will be doomed to death if faith in the revival of our creative forces dries up, ”wrote A. Schweitzer.
A. Schweitzer, developing ideas about the protection of culture as the goal of mankind, formulated the principle of reverence for life. This principle is associated with the attitude to man as the highest value, with humanism. “Reverence for life and the desire to raise a person and humanity to the level of the highest value due to it, - writes A. Schweitzer, - orients a person towards the perfect, pure ideals of culture, consciously arguing with reality. Surrendering entirely to the difficult struggle for existence, many of us no longer have the strength to think about the ideals associated with culture. They no longer show objectivity in this matter. All their thoughts are directed only to the improvement of their own being. The ideals that they put forward in this case are passed off by them as cultural ideals and thereby bring complete confusion into the concept of culture. Putting forward as the goal of culture the true humanity that everyone can achieve by leading a life that is most worthy of a person, we must abandon the uncritical overestimation of the external side of culture, which we have seen since the end of the 19th century. We understand more and more that it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the essential and the non-essential in culture. The ghost of a culture devoid of spirituality is losing its power over us. We dare to face the truth and affirm that with the progress of knowledge and practice, it has become not easier, but harder, to achieve culture. We are faced with the problem of interaction between the spiritual and the material. We know that we all must fight against circumstances for our humanity and take care to turn this struggle from hopeless to promising again.
And as A. Schweitzer further emphasizes, “today the history of mankind decides the question of the predominance of a humane or inhumane worldview. And if this decision is in favor of inhumanity ... humanity will perish.
In turn, K.-G. Jung explained the socio-political crisis of Western European culture as a whole by the invasion of archetypes into the life of society. The consequence of this invasion, he considered the racism of the Nazis and the communist dogma of universal equality. Torchlight processions, mass psychosis, fiery speeches of leaders, symbols (the swastika in Germany and the red star in the USSR) - all this testified, according to Jung, to an invasion of cultural life societies of forces far beyond the human mind and subconscious in nature.
Thus, even a superficial analysis of the state of modern culture speaks of its crisis on an unprecedented scale.
The changes in life and thoughts that have taken place since the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century with increasing acceleration, inevitably had to call into question the basic principles that determine the existence of a person, and from the positions of which we consider his actions. What we call humanism, ethics, civilization, culture, that is, the values ​​that guide us and on the basis of which we evaluate our behavior, was also called into question. Due to many conflicting reasons, these traditional values ​​are under threat, they are tottering, and soon collapse, as the expansion and qualitative change in our knowledge of the world testifies against them. History has revealed the existence of civilizations and societies based on other moral concepts and other value systems. In the face of a multitude of ethical systems, we cannot give absolute weight to our established criteria.
At the end of the 20th century, the epithet "humanistic" became an integral part of many global concepts, the authors of which tried to rethink the ideas and ideas traditional for the Western world about the values ​​of life and the goals of society's development, speaking of the "new humanism" as a necessary prerequisite and the main condition for the humanization of human existence. These works emphasized that at present it is extremely important to “awaken in us the “new man” with the invigorating spirit of the new humanism ...” and that the future “humane world order” should be based on the “new humanism”.
Speaking about the revolutionary role of the "new humanism" in the transformation of people's life orientations, A. Peccei identifies three of its main value aspects: understanding of globality, striving for justice, and aversion to violence. All these aspects, according to Peccei, are extremely important for overcoming the "internal crisis" that modern man is experiencing, and for forming his new attitude to the world and to himself. A person must turn his gaze on himself, understand that only in himself are hidden forces, the development of which can contribute to the resolution of his "internal crisis" and, consequently, the "crisis of mankind."
First of all, according to Peccei, a person needs to realize the global nature of the events taking place in the world, to form a correct idea about the logic of the global functioning of the world system, and most importantly, about himself as an integral part of the surrounding nature, the entire universe. The “new humanism”, therefore, should be based on a certain vision of man as a total and at the same time finite being living in the global continuum of the world. “And in order to be people in the true sense of the word,” A. Peccei writes, “we must develop in ourselves such an understanding of the global nature of all events and phenomena that would reflect the essence and foundation of the entire Universe.”
Equally important value aspects of the “new humanism” are justice and aversion to violence. Justice is "the most important principle of the new humanism", one of the humanistic ideas that inspires people to create a "new world order". Justice is closely related to human freedom as a decisive prerequisite for the revival of the "human spirit", the development of human dignity, "human quality". The achievement of justice should, according to Peccei, exclude violence, which is nothing more than a cultural and social pathology. Therefore, "the philosophy of the denial of violence should become one of the principles of the new humanism."
Thus, the "new humanism" of A. Peccei rests on such principles and values ​​of life, each of which is really important for the humanization of man. The modern globalizing world is such a complex system of interacting elements that without taking into account the global nature of the processes taking place in it and considering a person as an active subject of activity that transforms the natural environment, social life and oneself, it is practically impossible to successfully resolve global problems. It is also true that without the establishment of justice, social equality between people, there can be no question of any humanization of a person. The eradication of violence, which has become Western culture into a kind of cult, is also, of course, necessary prerequisite humanization of man and culture in the modern information society.
Today, most modern Western scientists are pinning their hopes on some kind of "spiritual revolution", the result of which will be a new culture of "harmonic globalism", putting in the first place "quality, not quantity, preservation, not destruction, cooperation, not competition." This approach has been developed in a whole range of "survival strategies" based on the concept of "human consciousness reforms". In particular, a number of reports to the Club of Rome were devoted to these issues, such as “Goals for Humanity” by E. Laszlo, “There are no limits to learning” by J. Botkin, M. Elmangera, M. Malica, “Dialogue on Wealth and Wealth” Jiriani, etc. And it is no coincidence that the main thing that the founder of the Club of Rome A. Peccei stood up for was a qualitative leap in human thinking. He called such a leap a "human revolution" and emphasized that its implementation is possible only through the development and improvement of man himself.
One of the most active members of the Club of Rome, E. Laszlo, in his book Leap into the Future: Building Tomorrow's World Today, substantiated the thesis that the crisis phenomena of the modern world are a direct consequence of the dominant value system. Such “classical” values ​​of Western society as the principle of “Laisser faire” (permissiveness), the cult of efficiency, the “law of the jungle”, economic rationality (measuring everything in money, the technological imperative (everything that can be done must be done) and others , are, in his opinion, one of the main reasons for the aggravation of modern global problems.
In his article “Humanism and the New World Order,” the historian Christopher Dawson seventy years ago described what is happening to the West in these terms: “For centuries, civilization has followed the chosen path, worshiped the same ideas, recognized the same morality and the same Intellectual standards. And then, absolutely suddenly, something happens, the sources of the former life dry up in the blink of an eye, people suddenly wake up in a new world, in which the principles of the old world instantly lose their significance and become simply useless ... It seems that such a transition is just taking place in the West .
Hence, - notes the Kazakh philosopher N. Amrekulov, - "... and the flat materialism of the West, the destructive philosophy "after us even a deluge" is the ultimate source of the crisis of the West."
True humanism in relation to a person should not consist in flirting with him, not in justifying and affirming his facelessness and passivity, but in inducing him to meaningful being, to developing his own personality, and not erasing its originality. Accordingly, real humanism implies the development of the entire wealth of human culture.
The basic ideas for the development of a new humanitarian paradigm - globalistics can be: the idea of ​​the unity of the world (V.I. Vernadsky, P. Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo Ghosh, N.N. Moiseev), the idea of ​​the universal destiny of the individual (G. Polde, G. Sheffer) , the idea of ​​ethical rationality (A.D. Ursul), the idea of ​​non-violence (L.N. Tolstoy, M.K. Gandhi), the idea of ​​co-evolution (N.N. Moiseev), the idea of ​​a dialogue of civilizations and the idea of ​​sustainable development. They are based on core values modern humanity- the values ​​of Nature and Man, and the idea of ​​cooperation between people on the planet to humanize their coexistence. Today, the focus is on the spirituality of man, a conscious orientation to the highest values, because it is the spirituality of mankind that owes its progress.
It is no coincidence that, for example, Academician B.V. Rauschenbach believes that "the movement towards humanism is inevitable, because man has become too dangerous for himself."
Obviously, the main problem is the person himself, who is experiencing a state close to an anthropological catastrophe. The term "anthropological catastrophe" was introduced by M.K. Mamardashvili. It seems to us successful, because behind all our catastrophes - and there are many, big and small, simple and complex - there is a human crisis. This crisis manifests itself, first of all, in the fact that there are no people who are able to understand what is happening not within the framework of a ready-made conceptual grid, not in ideologemes, but openly. The basis of the anthropological catastrophe is man's inability to come into contact with reality. This phenomenon is the product of an ideologized structure that displaces genuine consciousness. It is during such periods that a person loses the ability to understand what is happening and generate meanings that meet the new conditions of life.
Having subjected the crisis state of modern culture to a socio-philosophical, philosophical and cultural analysis, a completely new question arises before us: What are we witnessing - the decline of the old culture or the awakening of a completely new one? If this question is correctly posed, and if both proposed answers are correct, then it follows that among the bearers of the former culture, the forerunners of the new must appear. This is how we should perceive the irrational philosophy of the twentieth century.
Is culture humane? And if not, what is humanism? The answer to this fundamental question, the question, the answer to which is the very purpose of culture, took on significant importance in the work of the greatest thinkers who played a decisive role in the world culture of the twentieth century. These include Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Nietzsche was the first to recognize the depravity of contemporary culture and openly and loudly declared this. “Let the weak and ugly die - the first commandment of our philanthropy. We must also help them die, ”he wrote in one of his last works.
About what kind of "philanthropy" i.e. humanism says Nietzsche? Nietzsche's philanthropy is the negation of established moral standards, because they, the philosopher believes, led to decadence (decline), i.e. to a general spiritual crisis. Nietzsche reflects on the collapse of European spirituality, the overthrow of past values ​​and norms, the “revolt of the masses” (H. Ortega y Gasset) and the creation of a monstrous mass culture to fool them and serve them, the unification of people under the cover of their imaginary equality, the beginning of the struggle for domination over everything the globe, attempts to grow a new master race, tyrannical regimes as a product of the democratic system.
The socio-psychological sphere of society during this period is characterized by a sharp change in states: from relative spiritual comfort, calmness, stagnation to a state of rapid change, uncertainty and fear of the future, spiritual throwing, aggressive irritation, social and interethnic tension.
For Nietzsche, nihilism is a natural outcome of the development of European civilization, an inevitable, but not the last and final state of society; according to him, nihilism is the logical and psychological premise of the movement that will replace it in the future, and which "can arise exclusively after it and from it." Nietzsche likens nihilism to a disease that needs to be overcome in order to come to a new worldview. Nihilism, therefore, is not the beginning of the end, but a “great starting point”, the beginning of a “great noon”, when the old picture of the world no longer corresponds to the new realities, and the new one has not yet been developed. Nietzsche characterizes this state as follows: “we have lost the stability that made it possible to live - for some time we are unable to figure out where we should go,” because there are no beaten paths in the open expanses of the ocean.
Thus, Nietzsche is not only the herald of European nihilism, but also the first person to attempt to identify ways out of it. He, the "historian of the next two centuries", saw not only tomorrow - the era of the apotheosis and collapse of modernity, but also the day after tomorrow - the era of postmodernity, the period of rethinking the results of Western civilization. The most terrible upheavals of mankind in the twentieth century cause the need to change their minds. Unrestrained development, rapid movement towards unattainable goals, like a horizon line, turned into disappointment and, along with it, a sense of the need for a new worldview.
It was necessary to listen attentively to this disturbing, tragic voice, for what he screams about is true. But the hopes of mankind are beyond this truth. We cannot give up the search for the meaning of our existence: the answer to the crisis of civilization is the search for a new humanism.
Nietzsche's philosophy had a radical influence on the course of social thought, for it showed that existing humanism is an attempt to "grow a contradiction to itself out of humanitas." A kind of humanism of the new wave was the philosophy of existentialism (the philosophy of existence) of the most influential philosophical trend of the twentieth century.
Existentialism, or the philosophy of existence, has played and continues to play a significant role in the development of modern philosophy. It is characterized by an anti-scientistic orientation and is focused on problems associated with a person, the meaning of his being, which is becoming relevant in the global processes of our time.
As noted by the famous modern English existentialist writer J. Fowles: “Existentialism is a revolt of a person against all systems of thinking, psychological theories and all kinds of socio-political oppression, seeking to deprive him of his individuality ”” And further: “... an attempt to overcome the ubiquitous and increasingly dangerous feeling of dumb * in modern world» .
One of the main questions of philosophy, including existentialism, is the question: What is a person at the beginning of his existence? How does a person create himself? The creation of man, i.e. humanity is precisely what humanism considers. If traditional humanism considers a person as an end (and not a means) and the highest value, then existentialism rejects such humanism, since "it cannot be recognized that a person could be judged by a person" and one cannot consider "a person as an end, since a person is not completed" . Otherwise, a cult of ideally completed humanity may arise, the negative consequences of which are evidenced by fascism and communism, which almost destroyed humanity in the 20th century.
But there is another understanding of humanism, namely: a person is not some kind of self-sufficient being (ie, the goal and the highest value in itself); man is being-in-the-world, i.e. the humanity of a person, his humanism is determined by his existence in the world, the world in which the connection of transcendence (internal) and subjectivity (external) is realized.
From the point of view of existentialism, a person is constantly outside himself. He projects himself into his future. J.-P. Sartre, in his famous report “Existentialism is humanism” (1946), quotes F. Ponge (French poet) “Man is the future of man”. But the future is something that is unknown. How to project yourself into the unknown? This means: proceeding from the existentials of existence, to pursue transcendent goals. It is this understanding of man, i.e. not its essence, but the mode of existence, existentialism puts at the basis of its humanism. There is no legislator over a person, a person is thrown into the world, i.e. he is alone and no one needs him, and it is on the basis of this situation that he must decide his own fate.
M. Heidegger approached the problem of humanism from a slightly different position in his work “Letter on Humanism”, which was written in response to the work of Sartre considered above. The main idea of ​​Heidegger is that traditional humanism, as a term of metaphysics, puts the humanity of a person not yet high enough. Therefore, Heidegger asks the question: Does humanism lead to the authenticity of man? After all, in the end, a person must find his authenticity, which in traditional language means humanity (humanity). In order to answer this question, the philosopher asks the following question: “However, on what does human humanity stand?” and replies "she rests in his being". But how is the essence of man understood? Considering various interpretations of the human being, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that, despite all their diversity, they all agree that they determine the humanity of a person against the background of what is also subject to interpretation. Hence, there is a discrepancy in the interpretation of the term humanism. Since the fundamental principle of all that exists is being, Heidegger proposes to consider the essence of man in his relation to being. “When defining the humanity of man, humanism not only does not ask about the relation of being to a human being. Humanism even prevents us from posing this question, because, in view of its origin from metaphysics, it does not know and does not understand it.
Metaphysics, according to the philosopher, thinks through only the being of beings, but not being itself. The truth of being remains aloof from metaphysics, and, consequently, humanism, as a concept of metaphysics, cannot think over the essence of man in the light of the truth of being. But how is man's relation to being realized? Through thought and language, Heidegger notes.
Heidegger insists that the essence is determined not from existence, as Sartre suggests (existence precedes essence), but from the ecstatics of being-here, Dasein. “As an executor, a person bears being-behold, since he makes “behold” as a clearing of being with his “care”. In defining the humanity of a person as an existence, it is not a person that is essential, but being and being-that is, which the existing person bears on himself. The humanness of a person turns into a person's concern for .... A person's concern for ... makes him a "shepherd of being." This is the humanism of Heidegger. His thought, he believes, is opposed to traditional humanism, because the latter does not approach the essence of man and, therefore, does not put it high enough.
The philosophy of the German thinker is not directed against humanism, no. The fundamental ontology of Heidegger is the change, the abolition of all Western metaphysics. And the idea of ​​humanism has developed precisely on the basis of Western metaphysics. The latter gave rise to "homelessness, in which not only people wander, but the very essence of man." It is precisely on the basis of the "homelessness" of man that Heidegger critically comprehends humanism. Homelessness is a sign of oblivion of being, moreover, “homelessness becomes the fate of the world”. And this is already a global aspect of his ontology.
In order to reveal the humanity of man, Heidegger turned to the essence of language, on the basis of which he showed the superficiality of any humanism, for the thinking of humanism is metaphysical, this is the path to the homelessness of man.
In order to return a person to his true humanity, it is necessary to give a word to the unspoken meaning of being. Such a word is thought, and moreover, it is "the only matter of thought." It is necessary to return to a person that original language - a language conditioned by the law of relevance of existential-historical thought, which is defined by Heidegger as "strictness of comprehension, thoroughness of speech, stinginess of the word".
At the same time, Heidegger notes that “the thought that comprehends the truth of being as the original element of man, the bearer of eksistence, already contains the original ethics.” Heidegger opposes his concept to traditional humanism in the rational and optimistic form of the 18th-19th centuries, as well as to the dogmatic form of affirming immutable values. However, he refutes humanism not in the name of anti-humanism, but in the name of man's eksistence, his incompleteness, his creative knowledge.
According to Heidegger, the essence of a person - eksistence - is in abandonment, in loneliness, thrown in this globalizing world, in melancholy, in despair, since a person never appears as himself as a stable, complete being, in control of himself and things, but as a constant sliding, escape into the void, into nothingness.
The human task, therefore, consists in constant moral growth - therefore, one of the main lessons of existentialism is the understanding of the need to overcome any narrowly social, pragmatic orientations of consciousness that led humanity in the twentieth century to a global worldview crisis. An attempt to overcome “moral nausea” (M. Nordau) in a decaying world, where “everything is undermined” (F.M. Dostoevsky), where “life has dried up in its sources” (V.V. Rozanov). Against this narrowness and narrow-mindedness, the “rebellious person” (A. Camus) opposes, rejecting the material- object world, affirming their ineradicable need for the spirit, for spirituality, for unity.
A. Peccei, believed that the crisis of mankind can be prevented not by the rejection of scientific and technological progress, but by the improvement of human qualities on the basis of modern humanism - the desire for justice, aversion to violence. This will make it possible to move on to new conditions for the existence of a person and culture, and a person faces a non-trivial task: to return to a person the inspiration of spiritual truths, to breathe into him the lost faith in the unity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
Thus, “in the era of technical civilization, such a unifying trend is the only saving one for mankind. Another, reverse trend will have an apocalyptic end.

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24. Francis Beauchesne Thornton, ed, Return to Tradition (Fort Collins, Colo: Roman Catholic Books), p. 304 / Cit. by: Buchanan P.J. Death of the West. - M .: OOO "AST Publishing House", 2004. - P. 312.
25. Amrekulov N. Your way. Part VIII. Nomad Genesis // Freedom of speech. 2007. No. 48 (142). - S. 25.
26 cm. golden ratio. Secular magazine about the religions of the world. No. 1 / March-April 2000. - P. 33.
27. Nietzsche F. Anti-Christian // Twilight of the Gods. - M .: Politizdat, 1989. - S. 19.
28. Nietzsche F. Anti-Christian // Twilight of the Gods. - M .: Politizdat, 1989. - S. 92.
* according to J. Fowles, “nemo is a possibility, what I am not” // see Fowles J. Aristos. - M .: Publishing House of EKSMO-Press, 2002. - P. 107.
29. Ibid. - S. 232-233.
30. Sartre J.P. Existentialism is humanism // Twilight of the gods. – M.: Politizdat. 1989. - S. 343.
31. Ibid.
32. Sartre J.P. Existentialism is humanism // Twilight of the gods. – M.: Politizdat. 1989. - S. 343.
33. Heidegger M. Letter about humanism // Heidegger M. Time and being. - M., 1993. - S. 192-221.
34. Heidegger M. Letter about humanism // Heidegger M. Time and being. - M., 1993. - S. 197.
35. Heidegger M. Being and time. - M.: 1997. - S. 200.
36. Ibid. - S. 206.
37. Ibid. - S. 207.
38. Ibid. - S. 219.
39. Ibid. - S. 220.
40. Ibid. - S. 220.
41. Peccei A. Human qualities. – M.: Progress, 1980.
42. Kolchigin S.Yu. The logic of a holistic worldview. - Alma-Ata: Gylym, 1993. - 200 p.-p. 8.

Dehumanization is one of the most cruel ways of media war, as it is aimed at eradicating humanity, cohesion of people and provokes unlimited superiority, permissiveness of dehumanizers over those to whom it is directed.

Examples

A classic example where dehumanization has been observed is Nazi Germany, which spread ideas about the superiority of the Aryans over all other peoples.

A similar example is the racist policy of apartheid in South Africa or the mutual desire to "dehumanize" the Bolsheviks and supporters of the "white" movement during the civil war.

Often, dehumanization becomes a weapon in the hands of the warring parties, as was the case during the Second World War or during the period cold war and arms races.

There are many examples of this phenomenon. It is still actively used in the media today.

Dehumanization of culture

This term was introduced by the world famous Spanish culturologist and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. According to the definition given by him in 1925, dehumanization is the removal from art of everything "too human", everything that has aesthetic beauty. The reproduction of life in "forms of life itself" is supposed.

This method of information warfare is an extremely dangerous weapon that the "tops" of political power use to completely destroy the image of those who are objectionable, whether they are enemies or competitors. With the help of the media, the Internet and mass art, a negative image of people who have undergone dehumanization is created in the minds of people.

Modern society - and not only Russian, but Russian in a particularly obvious form - is undergoing an intense transformation. It is not only and not so much about production and information technology, the dynamics of forms of business activity or the dynamics of political structures at the global and national levels. Transformations are by no means external, but internal and spiritual, not just aspects, but the foundations of social life - up to morality and religion.

Modern man finds the details of his appearance, familiar properties, connections, structures, but not himself. It moves towards itself, but never reaches itself, falling into the objective world surrounding it. The desperate search for self-determination, freedom and responsibility of modern man, as well as the desire to get away from this freedom and responsibility, in no way achieve the desired result.

The processes of social transformation, especially such a large-scale and deep one, are very dramatic and traumatic. Often they are perceived as the loss or destruction of the foundations of human existence, as the dehumanization of society and the loss of the prospects of spirituality. However, this qualification raises a number of questions. Do pretentious formulations like “problems of dehumanization of modern society” mean that earlier society was “humanized”. Where and when was such a society?

And what is dehumanization anyway? Dehumanization? Loss of humanity? In what and where? In civilization? In culture? In philosophy? How does this dehumanization manifest itself? In the growth of violence - primarily on the part of the authorities? In the technological consideration of man as a means in politics, in management, even in medicine - as a supplier of spare parts, in art? And here the question is debatable. Suffice it to at least recall the achievements in the protection environment, in medicine, the degree of comfort of life and working conditions achieved by modern civilization. And is dehumanization possible in principle, if all its manifestations are the work of human hands, the embodiment of his ideas, needs, aspirations?

The main problem is not in dehumanization, but in the person himself. And our time, indeed, poses this problem extremely acutely. Man himself has become problematic, in need of some kind of homodycy. What is a person? By the end of the 20th century, it becomes more and more clear that in its dual nature, in the unity of body and consciousness, flesh and spirit, the essence of man is nevertheless connected with the latter.

The main pathos of criticism of modern society is aimed at the meaninglessness of being, rooted in utilitarianism, economism and technism, commercial, capitalist and, in the end, bureaucratic institutions of power, tending to deprive life of its semantic richness and depth. The accusations take many forms: it is claimed that there is no more place for heroism, aristocratic virtues, lofty goals, love and a sense of the depth of life have been lost.

If you wish, you can blame Descartes for everything, who first asked himself the problem of human self-consciousness. “... From the devastated cogito, Descartes, like a spider, pulled out the world - the modern world, in fact, the material world, the materialistic world, the world of the Enlightenment, probably the Western, imperialist, Protestant and capitalist, ethnocentric and phallocentric technological world as such, and not the world of meaning and love, laughter and tears, but the world of abstract thinking.

We live in a period of extreme individualism and, at the same time, deep depersonalization. The individual strives to act in accordance with his own ideas about life and his purpose, to do his own thing, but all these ideas and ways of life experience powerful external pressures and sooner or later come down to the desire to meet certain group subcultural standards, social roles. Only one thing is required of a person - to identify himself with some matrices, to accept such a matrix as his identity. In contrast to neoliberal ideas about the "end of history", there are a large number of different groups and movements that are waiting for abrupt and radical changes that bring unexpected metamorphoses to humanity. Someone is waiting for this from space aliens, someone from in-depth collective training - meditation, invocation, etc., someone - a new coming of Christ, a new Avatar or some kind of cosmic Essence that will renew everything and everything. For any unbiased observer, it is obvious that we live in an era of intensive transition of human (personal and social) existence from one state to another, in an era of total liminality. We are talking about qualitative changes, not quantitative buildup. social organization and communications, about qualitative changes in the ways of life, communication, consciousness - moreover, very ambiguous changes. Just as a ten-year-old girl has very vague ideas about the fact that married life will require from her a fundamental change in consciousness and emotional reactions, so today's humanity has very vague ideas about its future - not in terms of the future of civilization, but in a more fundamental way, in terms of individuation plan.

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X. Ortega y Gasset's concept of culture determined his solution to other problems, including his theory of culture. But also the doctrine of X. Ortega y Gasset about culture was at the same time largely conditioned by the specific socio-historical situation of European bourgeois society in the first half of the 20th century. “The division of labor, in the conditions of bourgeois society, leading to a widening gap between physical and mental labor, between material and spiritual production, and the closely related process of alienation, as a result of which the individual turns into a unilaterally developed appendage industrial production, led to the fact that in the process of production the individual gradually ceased to act as a subject of cultural and historical action. Reflecting this process and trying to comprehend it, bourgeois thinkers, starting with the Enlightenment, contrasted the work of people and their activities in the field of culture.

The concept of culture of X. Ortega y Gasset had several aspects corresponding to the stages of development of his philosophy, but in all cases the philosopher opposed the emerging bourgeois mass culture as a pseudo-culture with the standards of thinking embedded in it, thereby leading a person away from independent - in this case, through familiarization with culture - the development of the world, from the tasks of independent comprehension of one's being. In the works of X. Ortega y Gasset, the term "mass culture" is not used, but the features of bourgeois culture as "mass culture" become the object of his criticism.

The concept of culture by X. Ortega y Gasset, set forth in The Theme of Our Time, is distinguished by a certain biologization. But, linking culture with the biological life of a person, Ortega thus opposed the anonymity of understanding culture, tried to present true culture as part of a person’s own individual being, as something that does not exist outside of him, but only in interaction with him.

Another aspect of X. Ortega y Gasset's teachings about culture is connected with an attempt to reveal it as a system of ideas about the world and about man, which governs the everyday existence of man in the world. X. Ortega y Gasset considered culture as a means, a tool that helps a person in his life. A person is often compared by X. Ortega y Gasset with a shipwrecked person: in order to be saved, he must grab onto something: as a means of salvation, he grabs at culture, its principles, values, ideas. From the point of view of X. Ortega y Gasset, culture is a system of clear and firm ideas, a set of beliefs.

X. Ortega y Gasset's study of culture as a system of not only ideas, but ideas-beliefs is closely connected with his critique of bourgeois culture, which was turning into mass culture.

Emphasizing the connection of culture with the life of the individual, X. Ortega y Gasset sought to disturb the bourgeois consciousness that had calmed itself, forcing its modern representatives to return to the awareness of the drama of life and the need for a person to reckon with this drama.

In connection with the analysis of culture X. Ortega y Gasset “raised the question of what constitutes complex world ideas of man. Noting that the ideas of man have a different nature, he first of all dwelled on the difference between the ideas of science and the ideas of culture.

“A person knows the ideas of science, is obliged to reckon with them, without them he cannot live at the level of his time. For example, physics and its way of thinking are for X. Ortega y Gasset one of the internal engines of the soul of modern European man. Man lives by the ideas of culture. Culture is a sphere of effective beliefs about what the world is and what neighbors are, about what is the hierarchy of objects and actions.

Therefore, the ideas-beliefs that make up culture, in contrast to the ideas-knowledge of science, X. Ortega y Gasset designated as living ideas. Culture is a system of living ideas that every time has.

These ideas-beliefs related to the sphere of culture, X. Ortega y Gasset called beliefs, emphasizing that they should not be confused.

In his discussions about culture, the Spanish thinker expressed his awareness of the crisis in the worldview of a man of the bourgeois world. The system of ideas that fed the consciousness of this man and served as the spiritual basis of his existence in the world showed its inconsistency. The man of the bourgeois world had a certain ideological arsenal, a certain set of ideas. But by the 20th century, it became clear that these ideas do not represent worldview truths. In the ideological system of a person of bourgeois society, numerous voids formed, which began to be filled with artificially created theoretical constructions, with the help of which they tried to explain and justify this world. The more voids arose, the more pseudo-ideas about the world were created.

The totality of pseudo-ideas about the world created that culture, which had lost touch with the living reality of human life, which, having turned into mass culture, assumed the functions of a dream factory.

The creation of more and more ideas, emerging from the place of human beliefs, led to an overproduction of ideas. The teachings of X. Ortega y Gasset about culture recorded the presence of a mass of ideas that exist without connection with the real beliefs of modern man. He stated that his era - the first half of the 20th century - is experiencing great anxiety, which ultimately arose from the fact that after a long period of abundant creation of intellectual products and maximum attention to it, a person does not know what to do with ideas. The modern European is beginning to feel that their role in life is different from what they were given before, but he does not yet know their true place in his life.

X. Ortega y Gasset, in his doctrine of culture, raised in an idealistic form the question of the ideological basis of human life, trying to determine in which layers of human consciousness it is rooted. Pointing to the emergence of a large number of ideas that are not rooted in the mind of a person, not perceived by him as constituting his life reality, X. Ortega y Gasset fixed the crisis of the bourgeois worldview, bourgeois ideology. But for him, this led to the conclusion that it was necessary to turn not to a system of ideas scientifically investigating the problems of human existence in the modern world, but to ideas that are inseparable from human life. The selection by him of special ideas - ideas-beliefs indicates that X. Ortega y Gasset himself intended to look for the foundations of the worldview in the layers of human consciousness close to ordinary consciousness, in other words, in the totality of ideas that a person possesses before the beginning of his scientific understanding of the world and which by its nature is very close to the "vital mind". X. Ortega y Gasset separated culture from science, pointing out the different nature of their truths. The truths of science, according to him, are anonymous, they exist objectively, independently in relation to man. The truths of culture have meaning only when they become part of his life.

Since X. Ortega y Gasset defines true culture as a "living" culture, i.e., inseparable from the life of individuals, familiarizing a person with cultural values ​​implies, firstly, the acceptance by an individual of certain cultural values, his personal familiarization with them and, secondly, the appeal of the individual to certain cultural values ​​due to his spontaneous, internal personal needs. In other words, a person can treat the ideas and truths of science as existing independently of him. The values ​​of culture exist for a person only if he is personally affected by them, if he recreated them for himself, included them in his world, made them his personal property.

Culture, thus, appears in the teachings of X. Ortega y Gasset “as a sphere that performs special functions in human life. Scientific ideas, giving a person knowledge about the external world, orient him in this world in accordance with the laws that operate in it. The ideas of culture are designed to help a person in his internal orientation.

The main problem is the existence of a person in the modern world, in this case in the world of modern culture. He sets before the individual a very important task in the conditions of a mass society: to comprehend the nature of modern bourgeois culture, to overcome its influence, to free oneself from the standards of thinking contained in it, and to revive in oneself the ability to genuinely become involved in culture, to genuine cultural activity. However, at the same time, the struggle for authenticity in the sphere of cultural activity, the struggle against the standards that put pressure on his consciousness, acts as a personal task of the individual, in the solution of which he can and must rely only on himself.