Arthur Schopenhauer(1788 - 1860) belongs to that galaxy of European philosophers who during their lifetime were not “in the lead”, but nevertheless had a noticeable influence on the philosophy and culture of their time and the next century.
He was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) into a wealthy and cultured family; his father, Heinrich Floris, was a merchant and banker, his mother, Johann Schopenhauer, was a famous writer and head of a literary salon, among whose visitors was W. Goethe. Arthur Schopenhauer studied at the commercial school in Hamburg, where the family moved, then privately studied in France and England. Later there was the Weimar Gymnasium and, finally, the University of Göttingen: here Schopenhauer studied philosophy and the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, botany, anatomy, astronomy, and even took a course in anthropology. Philosophy, however, was a real hobby, and Plato and I. Kant were idols. Along with them, he was attracted by ancient Indian philosophy (Vedas, Upanishads). These hobbies became the basis of his future philosophical outlook.
In 1819, the main work of A. Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation,” was published, in which he gave a system of philosophical knowledge as he saw it. But this book was not successful, because in Germany at that time there were enough authorities who controlled the minds of contemporaries. Among them, perhaps the first magnitude was Hegel, who had a very strained relationship with Schopenhauer. Having not received recognition at the University of Berlin, and indeed in society, Schopenhauer retired to live as a recluse in Frankfurt am Main until his death. Only in the 50s of the XIX century. Interest in the philosophy of Schopenhauer began to awaken in Germany, and it increased after his death.
A feature of the personality of A. Schopenhauer was his gloomy, gloomy and irritable character, which undoubtedly affected the general mood of his philosophy. It admittedly bears the stamp of deep pessimism. But with all this, he was a very gifted person with versatile erudition, great literary skill; he spoke many ancient and new languages and was undoubtedly one of the most educated people of his time.
In the philosophy of Schopenhauer, two characteristic points are usually distinguished: this is the doctrine of the will and pessimism.
The doctrine of will is the semantic core of Schopenhauer's philosophical system. The mistake of all philosophers, he proclaimed, was that they saw the basis of man in the intellect, while in fact it - this basis, lies exclusively in the will, which is completely different from the intellect, and only it is original. Moreover, the will is not only the basis of man, but it is also inner base world, its essence. It is eternal, not subject to death, and in itself is baseless, that is, self-sufficient.
Two worlds must be distinguished in connection with the doctrine of the will:
I. the world where the law of causality prevails (that is, the one in which we live), and II. a world where not specific forms of things, not phenomena, but general transcendental essences are important. This is a world where we do not exist (the idea of doubling the world is taken by Schopenhauer from Plato).
In our everyday life, the will has an empirical character, it is subject to limitation; if this were not the case, a situation would arise with Buridan's donkey (Buridan is a scholastic of the 15th century who described this situation): placed between two armfuls of hay, different sides and equidistant from him, he, "having free will," would starve to death, unable to make a choice. Man in Everyday life constantly makes choices, but at the same time he inevitably limits free will.
Outside the empirical world, the will is independent of the law of causality. Here it is abstracted from the concrete form of things; it is conceived outside of all time as the essence of the world and man. Will is “a thing-in-itself” by I. Kant; it is not empirical, but transcendental.
In the spirit of I. Kant’s reasoning about a priori (pre-experimental) forms of sensibility - time and space, about the categories of reason (unity, plurality, wholeness, reality, causality, etc.), Schopenhauer reduces them to a single law of sufficient reason, which he considers “the mother of all sciences". This law is, of course, a priori. Its simplest form is time.
Further, Schopenhauer says that the subject and object are correlative moments, and not moments of causal connection, as is customary in rational philosophy. It follows that their interaction generates a representation.
But, as we have already noted, the world taken as a “thing-in-itself” is an unfounded will, and matter acts as its visible image. Being of matter is its "action" only by acting, it "fills" space and time. Schopenhauer sees the essence of matter in the connection between cause and effect.
Well acquainted with natural science, Schopenhauer explained all manifestations of nature by the endless fragmentation of the world will, multitude; its "objectifications". Among them is the human body. It connects the individual, his representation with the world will and, being its messenger, determines the state of the human mind. Through the body, the world will acts as the mainspring of all human actions.
Every act of the will is an act of the body, and vice versa. From this we come to an explanation of the nature of affects and motives of behavior, which are always determined by specific desires in this place, at this time, in these circumstances. The will itself is outside the law of motivation, but it is the basis of a person's character. It is “given” to a person and a person, as a rule, is not able to change it. This idea of Schopenhauer can be disputed, but later it will be reproduced by 3. Freud in connection with his doctrine of the subconscious.
The highest stage of objectification of the will is associated with a significant manifestation of individuality in the form of the human spirit. It manifests itself with the greatest force in art, in which the will reveals itself in its purest form. With this, Schopenhauer associates the theory of genius: genius does not follow the law of sufficient reason (consciousness following this law creates sciences that are the fruit of the mind and rationality), while genius is free, since it is infinitely distant from the world of cause and effect and, because of this, is close to insanity. So genius and madness have a point of contact (Horace spoke of "sweet madness").
In the light of the above premises, what is Schopenhauer's concept of freedom? He firmly states that freedom should not be sought in our individual actions, as rational philosophy does, but in the whole being and essence of man himself. In the current life, we see a lot of actions caused by causes and circumstances, as well as time and space, and our freedom is limited by them. But all these actions are essentially of the same character, and that is why they are free from causality.
In this reasoning, freedom is not expelled, but only moved from the area of current life to a higher one, but it is not so clearly accessible to our consciousness. Freedom in its essence is transcendental. This means that each person is initially and fundamentally free, and everything that he does has this freedom as its basis. This thought will meet us later in the philosophy of existentialism; J.-P. Sartre and A. Camus.
Now let's move on to the topic of pessimism in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Any pleasure, any happiness that people strive for at all times, have a negative character, since they - pleasure and happiness - are in essence the absence of something bad, suffering, for example. Our desire stems from the acts of will of our body, but desire is the suffering of the absence of what is desired. A satisfied desire inevitably gives rise to another desire (or several desires), and again we lust, etc. If we imagine all this in space as conditional points, then the voids between them will be filled with suffering, from which desires will arise (conditional points in our case) . This means that it is not pleasure, but suffering - this is that positive, constant, unchanging, always present, the presence of which we feel.
Schopenhauer claims that everything around us bears traces of despondency; everything pleasant is mixed with unpleasant; every pleasure destroys itself, every relief leads to new hardships. It follows from this that we must be unhappy in order to be happy, moreover, we cannot but be unhappy, and the reason for this is the person himself, his will. Optimism paints life for us as a kind of gift, but if we knew in advance what kind of gift it was, we would refuse it. In fact, need, deprivation, sorrow are crowned with death; the ancient Indian Brahmins saw this as the goal of life (Schopenhauer refers to the Vedas and Upanishads). In death we are afraid of losing the body, which is will itself.
But the will is objectified through the pangs of birth and the bitterness of death, and this is a stable objectification. This is immortality in time: the intellect perishes in death, but the will is not subject to death. Schopenhauer thought so.
His universal pessimism was in sharp contrast to the mentality of Enlightenment philosophy and classical German philosophy. As for ordinary people, then they are used to being guided by the formula of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus: “Death does not concern us at all: while we exist, there is no death, and when there is death, we are not.” But let's give Schopenhauer his due: he shows us the world not in one color, but rather in two colors, that is, more real and thus leads us to the idea of what is the highest value of life. Pleasure, luck, happiness in themselves, or everything that precedes them is also valuable for us? Or maybe this is life itself?
Schopenhauer initiated the process of affirming the volitional component in European philosophy as opposed to a purely rational approach that reduces a person to the position of a thinking tool. His ideas about the primacy of will were supported and developed by A. Bergson, W. James, D. Dewey, Fr. Nietzsche and others. They were the basis of the “philosophy of life”.
Briefly about philosophy: the most important and basic about philosophy in summary
Philosophy of A. Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - German philosopher, one of the first representatives of irrationalism. Schopenhauer believed that the essence of the individual is the will, which is independent of the mind. This will is blind volition, which is inseparable from a corporeal being, namely, man. It is a manifestation of a certain cosmic force, the world will, which is the true content of all that exists.
The peculiarity of his teaching is voluntarism. Will is the beginning of any being, it gives rise to phenomena, or "representations".
The interests of the will are practical interests, and the goal of science is to satisfy these interests. Perfect knowledge is contemplation, which is free from the interests of the will and has nothing to do with practice. The area of contemplation is not science, but various types of art based on intuition.
Schopenhauer formulated the doctrine of freedom and necessity. The will, being a "thing in itself", is free, while the world of phenomena is conditioned by necessity and obeys the law of sufficient reason. Man, as one of the phenomena, is also subject to the laws of the empirical world.
Schopenhauer considers human life in terms of desire and satisfaction. By its nature, desire is suffering, since the satisfaction of a need leads to satiety and boredom, despair arises. Happiness is not a blissful state, but only deliverance from suffering, but this deliverance is accompanied by new suffering, boredom.
Suffering is a constant form of manifestation of life, a person can get rid of suffering only in its concrete expression.
Thus, the world is dominated by world evil, which is ineradicable, happiness is illusory, and suffering is inevitable, it is rooted in the very “will to live”. Therefore, for Schopenhauer, the existing world is "the worst possible."
Schopenhauer sees the way to get rid of evil in asceticism. Schopenhauer was a supporter of a violent police state.
Postclassical philosophy of the XIX-XX centuries
Postclassical philosophy of the 19th century is a stage in the development of philosophical thought that immediately precedes modern philosophy.
One of the main characteristics of this period of philosophy was irrationalism - the idea that the decisive factor in cognition, human behavior, worldview and history is not the mind, not the rational principle, but the irrational (unconscious).
Will, feeling, intuition, the unconscious, imagination, instinct, etc. become the central aspects of spiritual life. Representatives of irrationalism are A. Schopenhauer, S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche and others.
Another influential philosophical direction of this period is positivism: the source of genuine (positive), “positive” knowledge is individual concrete (empirical) sciences.
Philosophy cannot claim to be an independent study of reality. The founder of positivism is Auguste Comte. Positivism expressed the desire to strengthen the empirical-scientific aspect of philosophy up to its dissolution in the "positive" sciences. The positivists replaced the actual philosophical subject and method of research with a concrete scientific one. They denied the entire previous period in the development of philosophy and reduced it to specific sciences. In general, positivism arose as a negative reaction to Hegelian philosophy, with its speculative nature, its separation from actual reality.
In terms of ideological content, the philosophy of life is close to irrationalism - the philosophical direction of the late XIX - early XX centuries. This direction saw the main concept and subject of philosophy in the concept of "life".
Life is an organic integrity and creative dynamics of being. Representatives of this philosophical trend are F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, W. Dilthey, G. Simmel, O. Spengler. Life is in the process of continuous becoming. It cannot be known by the rational, one-sided methods of science. Life for a person is a subject of experience. The uncontrollability of life does not become a factor of human passivity. He seeks to go beyond the boundaries of his being, above all social, to rise above his own destiny. .....................................
“He came to a pessimistic outlook on life in his youth. In this view, he was primarily set up by the relationship that developed between his father and mother. Their marriage was unsuccessful. In 1803, when Arthur was 15, his parents divorced, and two years later his father, who was a merchant, committed suicide. Arthur also had a very difficult relationship with his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer. She was very liberated and, unlike her son, a very cheerful person. Arthur owed her his acquaintance with the great contemporaries - Johann Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and etc. But the whole point was that Johanna Schopenhauer loved only one person in her life - herself. That is why, in 1814, Arthur completely broke off relations with her. He was then 26 years old. A. Schopenhauer's own character also led to a pessimistic view of life. He was an extremely irritable and vindictive person. But most importantly, he was an extremely vain man. Most of all he envied the glory of the great Georg Hegel. He could not stand the optimistic mood of his dialectics. That is why his main work - "The World as Will and Representation" (1819), which he wrote at the age of 30, he wrote with the thought of overthrowing G. Hegel from the pedestal of the most famous German philosopher of that time. Unlike G. Hegel, who, although in an objectively idealistic form, but depicted the world as a single and developing system, A. Schopenhauer declared the world an endless war of all against all. Another philosopher he hated was Immanuel Kant. In the introduction to the main work, he frankly admitted that he created his philosophy "in spite of the unbearable Cantu with his critique of reason"
Danilenko V.P., Involution in spiritual culture: Pandora's Box, M., "Krasand", 2012, p. 372-373.
Philosophy of life: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
The irrationalist trend that developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its emergence was associated with the rapid development of biology, psychology and other sciences, which revealed the failure of the mechanistic picture of the world. At the center of this philosophy lies the concept of life as an absolute, infinite, unique beginning of the world, which, unlike matter and consciousness, is actively, diversely, eternally moving.
Arthur Schopenhauer- German philosopher-idealist; earned himself fame as a brilliant essayist. He considered himself a follower of Kant. In interpreting his philosophical views, the main emphasis was placed on the doctrine of a priori forms of sensibility to the detriment of the doctrine of the categorical structure of thinking. He singled out two aspects of understanding the subject: the one that is given as an object of perception, and the one that is the subject in itself. The world as a representation is entirely conditioned by the subject and is a sphere of visibility.
Schopenhauer is a supporter of voluntarism. Will in his teaching appears as a cosmic principle underlying the universe. Will, being a dark and mysterious force, is extremely egocentric, which means for each individual an eternal desire, anxiety, conflicts with other people.
The aesthetic ideal of Schopenhauer is in Buddhist nirvana, in the killing of the "will to live", in complete asceticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche- German philosopher, one of the founders of modern irrationalism in the form of a philosophy of life. His views have undergone a certain evolution from a romantic esthesia of the experience of culture through a "reassessment of all values" and a critique of "European nihilism" to a comprehensive concept of voluntarism.
The main provisions of the mature philosophy of Nietzsche are:
1. everything that exists is the will to power, power;
2. The world itself is a multitude of pictures of the world struggling with each other, or perspectives emanating from centers of power - perspectivism.
Nietzsche is a resolute opponent of the opposition of the "true world" accelerated in European culture to the empiric world, the origins of which he sees in the denial of life, in decadence. Nietzsche connects the critique of metaphysics with the critique of language. The deep internal inconsistency of Nietzsche's vitalism is manifested in the question of the relationship between the truth of this or that doctrine, idea, concept, etc. and their historical genesis. Major works: "Human, too human", "Merry Science", "Beyond Good", "Antichristian".
Schopenhauer's philosophy of life
The philosophy of life refers to those philosophical currents of the 19th - early 20th centuries, in which some philosophers protested against the dominance of epistemological and methodological problems in the philosophy of the New Age, primarily in German classical philosophy. Representatives of the philosophy of life were against focusing on the problems of cognition, logic, and methodology. They believed that detailed philosophy is detached from real problems, entangled in its own ideal designs, becomes too abstract, that is, it breaks away from life. Philosophy must investigate life.
From the point of view of most representatives of the philosophy of life, life is understood as a special integral reality, not reducible to either spirit or matter. It is customary to distinguish two main variants of the philosophy of life: Biological (A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche and others); Historical (W. Dilthey, O. Spengler).
The first representative of the philosophy of life was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). For some time, Schopenhauer worked with Hegel in the philosophy department at the University of Berlin. (Schopenhauer was assistant professor and Hegel was professor.) Interestingly, Schopenhauer made an attempt to teach his philosophy as an alternative course to Hegel's philosophy, and even scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel. But Schopenhauer failed and remained without listeners. Subsequently, from the second half of the 19th century, the glory of Schopenhauer eclipsed the glory of Hegel. The failure of the lectures in Berlin was doubly offensive to Schopenhauer, since he sharply negatively assessed Hegelian philosophy, sometimes calling it the delusions of a paranoid, then the impudent nonsense of a charlatan. Especially unflattering was Schopenhauer's opinion about dialectics, which he considered a cunning technique that masks the absurdity and shortcomings of the Hegelian system.
Schopenhauer's main work is The World as Will and Representation (1819). The title of this work reflects the main ideas of Schopenhauer's teachings. The whole world, from his point of view, is the will to live. The will to live is inherent in all living beings, including man, whose will to live is the most significant, because man is endowed with reason, knowledge. Each individual person has his own will to live - not the same for all people. All other people exist in his view as dependent on the boundless egoism of a person, as phenomena that are significant only from the point of view of his will to live, his interests. The human community is thus represented as a set of wills of individuals. A special organization - the state - somehow measures the manifestations of these wills so that people do not destroy each other. The overcoming of egoistic impulses is carried out, according to Schopenhauer, in the sphere of art and morality.
In the views of Schopenhauer one can notice some similarities with the ideas of Buddhism. And this is not accidental, since he knew Indian culture, highly appreciated and used its ideas in his teaching. True, Schopenhauer did not join the eightfold path of the Buddha, but just like the Buddhists, he was pessimistic about the attempts and the possibility of creating a just and happy society on Earth, devoid of suffering and selfishness. Therefore, the teachings of Schopenhauer are sometimes called pessimism. Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers who pointed out the important role in human life of the unconscious, instinctive impulses associated with the biological origin of man. Similar ideas were subsequently used by Freud in the creation of his theory. Schopenhauer's works were distinguished by their vivid style, metaphor, and figurative expression. One of his original works was "Treatise on Love", Schopenhauer believed that love is too serious a phenomenon to be left only to poets. In Schopenhauer's "Treatise" there are many interesting, vivid images arising from his system, for example, love is a strong attraction that occurs between two people of the opposite sex. Attraction, a mysterious force that attracts lovers, is a manifestation of the will of an unborn being, their unborn child - that is, nature “calculates” at the level of organisms of two people that, from a biological point of view, the combination of these organisms will give optimal offspring, and as a result, energy arises mutual attraction of these organisms.
Schopenhauer is usually called one of the founders of irrationalism, meaning by this term all those directions that belittled the role of a rational, conscious person in human behavior. According to the views of supporters of some philosophical schools, irrationalism is a negative phenomenon.
60. Philosophy of life (A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche and others)
"Philosophy of Life" was a popular trend in philosophy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The basis of the "philosophy of life" was the voluntaristic teaching of A. Schopenhauer about the will to life penetrating the entire universe. The main representatives of the "philosophy of life" in Germany were F. Nietzsche, W. Dilthey, O. Spengler, and in France - A. Bergson. Everything that exists (even in inorganic nature) is considered by representatives of the "philosophy of life" as a manifestation of life, which is the primary basis of the world's existence. Life is understood by them as a kind of initial activity of the spiritual principle. Absolutely everything that exists is permeated with life, and the biological life of plants, animals and people is only the most vivid expression of vital activity that exists anywhere in the world. Thus, it is typical for representatives of the “philosophy of life” to consider the universe from a biological position. Biological laws are transferred by them to inorganic nature and society. Life is essentially irrational and cannot be comprehended by reason. Reason will always simplify, average out the infinite variety of manifestations of life. From this follows a negative attitude towards rational science as a form of knowledge of the world. Representatives of the "philosophy of life" to a greater or lesser extent criticized the traditional norms of scientificity. Intuition, feeling, getting used to the spiritual world of the carriers of vital activity are declared to be the main cognitive means by representatives of the "philosophy of life". A person in his activity is guided not by reason, but by instinctive volitional impulses. Social life also cannot be judged from the standpoint of reason. The idea of social progress is denied by the "philosophy of life".
The forerunner of the emergence of the "philosophy of life" should be considered the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860), recognized as one of the founders of postclassical philosophy. Schopenhauer taught at the University of Berlin, he initially considered Hegel the main philosophical opponent and entered into discussions with him, and also spoke extremely dismissively of "professorial" philosophy, Schopenhauer was sharply critical of the philosophical systems of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach. However, Schopenhauer highly valued the philosophy of Kant and believed that after Kant, philosophy went down the wrong path, and it was necessary to return it to the correct path outlined in Kant's teaching. The main works of Schopenhauer are his works “On the fourfold root of the law of sufficient reason”, “The World as Will and Representation” (1818, 2 vols - 1844). Unlike other German philosophers, Schopenhauer strove to write for the general public, in a simple and accessible way. From 1831 until the end of his life, Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt am Main. It was only shortly before the death of its creator that Schopenhauer's philosophy gained popularity. Schopenhauer himself spoke of three sources of his philosophy. These sources were: 1. Kant. 2. Plato (the doctrine of ideas). 3. Ancient Indian philosophy. For the first time in European philosophy, Schopenhauer tried to create a synthesis of European and Indian philosophical thought. The philosophical system of Schopenhauer is a combination of subjective idealistic and objective idealistic views. Schopenhauer believed that philosophy should begin with the assertion that the world is only our representation. This distinguishes philosophy from ordinary views. The whole world is an object for the subject, a view for the beholder. Such statements constitute the subjective-idealistic moment in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Representations are divided into subject and object, which do not mutually determine each other. Here Schopenhauer distances himself both from materialism and from Fichte's idealism, which tends to solipsism. Using the concept of "matter", Schopenhauer sees the essence of matter in the action of an object on our body as a direct object. This action causes the appearance of contemplation. Schopenhauer generally accepts Kant's teaching on cognitive abilities, but rethinks it. The basis of all cognition, in his opinion, is the view, rational activity consists in the cognition of causes (animals also have reason, since they also catch cause-and-effect relationships), and the mind operates with concepts (only humans have it). Departing from Hegelian rationalism, Schopenhauer argues that intuitive, basically irrational knowledge is more valuable than reasonable. Schopenhauer strongly emphasizes the limitations of the mind. He believed that rational science can only cognize the relations between things, but not their essence. However, according to Schopenhauer, the world is not only our idea, but also will. Moreover, this is not our subjective will, but some kind of ontologically existing outside of our consciousness. world start . Such is the objective-idealistic moment in Schopenhauer's philosophy. If for Hegel the mind, which develops according to the laws of logic, (rationalism) acted as a similar world principle, then for Schopenhauer such a principle is the unreasonable world will, the manifestations of which he considers all objects and phenomena. The doctrine that the world is based on will and the priority of will over reason is called voluntarism. Will, according to Schopenhauer, is one, therefore he is a voluntaristic monist. Will is identified by Schopenhauer with the Kantian thing-in-itself, it is also outside space, time and unknowable in its essence. Concrete objects in our representation (manifestations of will) are things for us. The whole world appears to Schopenhauer as a manifestation of the will. Will is the origin of everything that exists and the absolute. All nature is an objectification of the will. The will of the world manifests itself in the magnet, crystals, the fall of bodies, the growth of plants, the instincts of animals, the daily behavior of people. As reality improves, the will manifests itself more clearly. Of considerable interest are the aesthetics and ethics of Schopenhauer. Aesthetics of Schopenhauer is close to the principles of romanticism. Of all the arts, Schopenhauer recognized music as the closest to the will, since it is the furthest from the conceptual, rational sphere and expresses only volitional impulses. Will is independent of mind control. It is not the mind that guides the will, but vice versa, the mind is the servant of the will. His task is to look for ways to implement what was commanded by the will, to translate its decisions into reality. This is ethical voluntarism. Volitional desire has no reasons and grounds. Every act of will is accompanied by a movement of the body. The will to live, common to man and all living beings, causes total selfishness, animal egoism in achieving life goals. Schopenhauer's views are generally pessimistic. He calls optimism "an unscrupulous worldview", "a bitter mockery of the untold suffering of mankind". Earthly life is like hell. Human life is full of suffering, and human existence turns into an eternal tragedy. People always strive for something, suffer from the lack of what they want, but even if they achieve their goal, boredom covers them, and this makes their existence even more unbearable, and the person himself begins to look for new suffering. It is possible to get rid of suffering only by extinguishing the will to live, leaving the subordination to the will, asceticism, renunciation of desires. Schopenhauer calls for altruism, compassion. Ultimately, by dissolving into nothingness, we overcome the opposing will. You can guess that in many ways these ideas are borrowed from Indian philosophy, in particular from the philosophy of Buddhism. The following representatives of the "philosophy of life" abandoned the altruistic ethics of Schopenhauer, borrowing and developing his voluntaristic ideas.
The most famous of the followers of the voluntarist philosophy of Schopenhauer was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), the brightest representative of the "philosophy of life". Nietzsche began as a specialist in classical philology. The main merit of Nietzsche in the study of ancient culture was the selection in the work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” of its two sides: Apollonian (light, harmonious, reasonable) and Dionysian (irrational, chaotic, dark). Nietzsche's favorite philosopher of antiquity was Heraclitus with his cult of confrontation, struggle, and his least favorite was the moralizing Socrates. Among the main works of Nietzsche, one should also include his works “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “On the Genealogy of Morals”, “The Will to Power”, “The Anti-Christian”. Nietzsche's writings were written in a free artistic and aphoristic form, far from accepted in traditional professorial philosophy. Nietzsche's philosophical work ended in 1889 due to mental illness. Philosophical ideas of Nietzsche are characterized by figurativeness. For example, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche states that everyone must go through 3 stages spiritual development. First, a person must become like a camel, then a lion, and, finally, become like a child in soul. Nietzsche was a militant atheist and anti-Christian. He regarded Christianity as a religion of the weak and unfortunate, suppressing the will to power. Nietzsche's motto was "God is dead." In the worldview of Nietzsche, one can notice a number of manifestations of pagan ideas. Nietzsche is the successor of many ideas of A. Schopenhauer. He also believes that the basis of the world and objects is the will. However, according to Nietzsche, there is not one will, there is an infinite number of wills. Every object or living being has its own will. Thus, Nietzsche can be considered a voluntaristic pluralist. Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's will to live with the will to power. Between all objects there is a struggle of their wills for power, which is most manifested in the animal world and human society. Life, according to Nietzsche, is “a specific will to the accumulation of force.” Every life strives for a maximum sense of power. Will manifests itself in the struggle for existence, but Nietzsche did not agree with Charles Darwin that the worthiest win in the outcome of this struggle. As a rule, the top The world is, according to Nietzsche, eternal fluidity, activity. Nietzsche put forward the theory of "eternal return", according to which, any events will repeat exactly once. This leads to the conclusion that phenomena are cyclical and there is no progressive development. Knowledge of Nietzsche considers it to be the development of useful fictions. He calls for truth to be called that which is practically useful and increases our will to power. A lie should be considered that which leads to a weakening of the will to power. One should know only that which contributes to the strengthening of the will. Excessive cognitive interest is detrimental, leads to unnecessary reflection and contradicts the maximum of vitality.On the whole, Nietzsche speaks from an irrationalist position. Anthropology and ethics of Nietzsche were that part of his philosophy, which provided her with considerable popularity at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nietzsche considered man to be an imperfect animal because of the weakening of his instincts. Even a modern person of the 19th century. seems to be a regression in relation to the man of the Renaissance. Nietzsche put forward the doctrine of the superman, standing on the other side of good and evil. The superman values strength, authority, aristocratic nobility and despises weakness, pity and mercy. Nietzsche's views are characterized by anti-philistine, anti-bourgeois pathos. In relation to the generally accepted norms of morality, Nietzsche spoke from the standpoint of nihilism, that is, their denial as completely as possible. He believed that it was necessary to check and reassess all values and keep only those that contribute to increasing the will to power, and discard the rest. Nietzsche contrasts the morality of masters and the morality of slaves in his writings. The set of feelings that characterize the morality of slaves, Nietzsche called ressentiment. He considered Christianity to be the highest manifestation of ressentiment, which, according to Nietzsche, was an invention of the Jews who took revenge on their Roman conquerors. Many of the ideas of anthropology and ethics of Nietzsche were the basis for the formation of the ideology of Nazism and served as a justification for his inhuman practices. During the years of the Nazi dictatorship, Nietzsche was considered the most revered philosopher in Germany.
The representative of a more respectable, academic version of the "philosophy of life" can be considered the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 - 1911), whose main works can be called "Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit", "Experience and Poetry". Dilthey believed that it was necessary to abandon the cult of reason and the dry, abstract understanding of the subject, characteristic of classical philosophy. He argued that not only the mind is involved in the process of cognition, but the whole being of man. Dilthey divided all sciences into 2 groups, differing in subject and method: the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit. The sciences of nature study reality that has arisen and exists without human participation, while the sciences of the spirit cognize the life of the human spirit and its objectified manifestations in cultural objects created by man. rational explanation based on the knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships, Dilthey considered the main method of the sciences of nature. The sciences about the spirit (humanities) should use understanding as the main method of cognition, carried out through irrational feeling, getting used to the spiritual world of other people, creators of cultural objects. Therefore, Dilthey is considered one of the founders of the doctrine of understanding - hermeneutics. Of the sciences, Dilthey called for much attention to be paid to psychology as a discipline linking the sciences of nature and the science of the spirit.
Another influential thinker of the "philosophy of life" in Germany is Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936), author of the work on the philosophy of culture and history "The Decline of Europe". Spengler considered his main task to be the construction of a morphology of world history, in many ways similar to morphology in the biological sciences. The author of "The Decline of Europe" spoke out against the idea of the universality of world history and against the division into antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times accepted in traditional historical science. O. Spengler is a prominent representative of the theory of local cultures. According to Spengler, there are many cultures, each with its own spiritual warehouse. Spengler considered culture to be the external expression of the basically irrational life of the soul of the people. The collective soul of the people in the phenomena of culture strives for self-expression. Each culture has its own science, its own art, its own worldview, its own political culture. All phenomena of each culture are set by the primary phenomenon (primary phenomenon), which manifests itself in various areas of the functioning of culture. In antiquity, such primordial phenomena were the naked body (Apollonian culture); for Western European culture, such an ancestral phenomenon is the concept of infinity, perspective (Faustian culture). Proto-phenomena determine the unique way of seeing and knowing the world, characteristic of each culture. The late stage in the development of culture, which is already beginning to tend to death, O. Spengler designates with the term "civilization". A deadening, ossified civilization is incompatible with a genuine, vital culture. Civilization is a rebirth, a breakdown of culture. At the onset of the civilization stage, a certain cultural community is no longer capable of creating anything fundamentally new. The death of culture occurs through the loss of its flexibility and diversity. Characteristic of civilization high level technology and law, accompanied by the decline of art, literature and religion. Spengler regarded the modern, “civilized” state of European society as a decline, “the decline of Europe”.
The main representative of the "philosophy of life" in France was Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his popular philosophical works. Bergson's main works: "Creative Evolution", "Duration and Simultaneity". Bergson opposed mechanism and dogmatic rationalism. Like all representatives of the “philosophy of life”, Bergson affirms life as a true and original reality, interpreted as a kind of integrity, radically different from matter and spirit, which are products of the decay of the life process. The essence of life, Bergson believes, can only be comprehended by intuition, which directly penetrates the object, merging with its individual nature. Intuition does not imply opposition of the known to the knower as an object to the subject; it is the recognition of life itself. The intellect, unlike intuition, is able to comprehend only the frozen, inert. It has purely practical functions. This is the critique of rationalism in the views of Bergson. Bergson urges to turn to own life consciousness, which is given to everyone directly. Self-observation, according to Bergson, makes it possible to discover that the fabric of mental life is the continuous variability of states that imperceptibly pass one into another, last. A. Bergson criticized evolutionary doctrine Ch. Darwin. The main source of development considered irrational activist " life impulse».
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860) belongs to that galaxy of European philosophers who during their lifetime were not “in the lead”, but nevertheless had a noticeable influence on the philosophy and culture of their time and the next century.
He was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) into a wealthy and cultured family; his father, Heinrich Floris, was a merchant and banker, his mother, Johann Schopenhauer, was a famous writer and head of a literary salon, among whose visitors was W. Goethe. Arthur Schopenhauer studied at the commercial school in Hamburg, where the family moved, then privately studied in France and England. Later there was the Weimar Gymnasium and, finally, the University of Göttingen: here Schopenhauer studied philosophy and the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, botany, anatomy, astronomy, and even took a course in anthropology. Philosophy, however, was a real hobby, and Plato and I. Kant were idols. Along with them, he was attracted by ancient Indian philosophy (Vedas, Upanishads). These hobbies became the basis of his future philosophical outlook.
In 1819, the main work of A. Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation,” was published, in which he gave a system of philosophical knowledge as he saw it. But this book was not successful, because in Germany at that time there were enough authorities who controlled the minds of contemporaries. Among them, perhaps the first magnitude was Hegel, who had a very strained relationship with Schopenhauer. Having not received recognition at the University of Berlin, and indeed in society, Schopenhauer retired to live as a recluse in Frankfurt am Main until his death. Only in the 50s of the XIX century. In Germany, interest in the philosophy of Schopenhauer began to awaken, and it increased after his death.
A feature of the personality of A. Schopenhauer was his gloomy, gloomy and irritable character, which undoubtedly affected the general mood of his philosophy. It admittedly bears the stamp of deep pessimism. But with all this, he was a very gifted person with versatile erudition, great literary skill; he spoke many ancient and new languages and was undoubtedly one of the most educated people of his time.
In the philosophy of Schopenhauer, two characteristic points are usually distinguished: this is the doctrine of the will and pessimism.
The doctrine of will is the semantic core of Schopenhauer's philosophical system. The mistake of all philosophers, he proclaimed, was that they saw the basis of man in the intellect, while in fact it - this basis, lies exclusively in the will, which is completely different from the intellect, and only it is original. Moreover, the will is not only the basis of man, but it is also the inner foundation of the world, its essence. It is eternal, not subject to death, and in itself is baseless, that is, self-sufficient.
Two worlds must be distinguished in connection with the doctrine of the will:
I. the world where the law of causality prevails (that is, the one in which we live), and II. a world where not specific forms of things, not phenomena, but general transcendental essences are important. This is a world where we do not exist (the idea of doubling the world is taken by Schopenhauer from Plato).
In our everyday life, the will has an empirical character, it is subject to limitation; if this were not the case, a situation would arise with Buridan’s donkey (Buridan is a scholastic of the 15th century who described this situation): placed between two armfuls of hay, on opposite sides and at the same distance from him, he, “possessing free will” died would be hungry, not being able to make a choice. A person in everyday life constantly makes choices, but at the same time he inevitably limits free will.
Outside the empirical world, the will is independent of the law of causality. Here it is abstracted from the concrete form of things; it is conceived outside of all time as the essence of the world and man. Will is “a thing-in-itself” by I. Kant; it is not empirical, but transcendental.
In the spirit of I. Kant’s reasoning about a priori (pre-experimental) forms of sensibility - time and space, about the categories of reason (unity, plurality, wholeness, reality, causality, etc.), Schopenhauer reduces them to a single law of sufficient reason, which he considers “the mother of all sciences". This law is, of course, a priori. Its simplest form is time.
Further, Schopenhauer says that the subject and object are correlative moments, and not moments of causal connection, as is customary in rational philosophy. It follows that their interaction generates a representation.
But, as we have already noted, the world taken as a “thing-in-itself” is an unfounded will, and matter acts as its visible image. Being of matter is its "action" only by acting, it "fills" space and time. Schopenhauer sees the essence of matter in the connection between cause and effect.
Well acquainted with natural science, Schopenhauer explained all manifestations of nature by the endless fragmentation of the world will, multitude; its "objectifications". Among them is the human body. It connects the individual, his representation with the world will and, being its messenger, determines the state of the human mind. Through the body, the world will acts as the mainspring of all human actions.
Every act of the will is an act of the body, and vice versa. From this we come to an explanation of the nature of affects and motives of behavior, which are always determined by specific desires in this place, at this time, in these circumstances. The will itself is outside the law of motivation, but it is the basis of a person's character. It is “given” to a person and a person, as a rule, is not able to change it. This idea of Schopenhauer can be disputed, but later it will be reproduced by 3. Freud in connection with his doctrine of the subconscious.
The highest stage of objectification of the will is associated with a significant manifestation of individuality in the form of the human spirit. It manifests itself with the greatest force in art, in which the will reveals itself in its purest form. With this, Schopenhauer associates the theory of genius: genius does not follow the law of sufficient reason (consciousness following this law creates sciences that are the fruit of the mind and rationality), while genius is free, since it is infinitely distant from the world of cause and effect and, because of this, is close to insanity. So genius and madness have a point of contact (Horace spoke of "sweet madness").
In the light of the above premises, what is Schopenhauer's concept of freedom? He firmly states that freedom should not be sought in our individual actions, as rational philosophy does, but in the whole being and essence of man himself. In the current life, we see a lot of actions caused by causes and circumstances, as well as time and space, and our freedom is limited by them. But all these actions are essentially of the same character, and that is why they are free from causality.
In this reasoning, freedom is not expelled, but only moved from the area of current life to a higher one, but it is not so clearly accessible to our consciousness. Freedom in its essence is transcendental. This means that each person is initially and fundamentally free, and everything that he does has this freedom as its basis. This thought will meet us later in the philosophy of existentialism; J.-P. Sartre and A. Camus.
Now let's move on to the topic of pessimism in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Any pleasure, any happiness that people strive for at all times, have a negative character, since they - pleasure and happiness - are in essence the absence of something bad, suffering, for example. Our desire stems from the acts of will of our body, but desire is the suffering of the absence of what is desired. A satisfied desire inevitably gives rise to another desire (or several desires), and again we lust, etc. If we imagine all this in space as conditional points, then the voids between them will be filled with suffering, from which desires will arise (conditional points in our case) . This means that it is not pleasure, but suffering - this is that positive, constant, unchanging, always present, the presence of which we feel.
Schopenhauer claims that everything around us bears traces of despondency; everything pleasant is mixed with unpleasant; every pleasure destroys itself, every relief leads to new hardships. It follows from this that we must be unhappy in order to be happy, moreover, we cannot but be unhappy, and the reason for this is the person himself, his will. Optimism paints life for us as a kind of gift, but if we knew in advance what kind of gift it was, we would refuse it. In fact, need, deprivation, sorrow are crowned with death; the ancient Indian Brahmins saw this as the goal of life (Schopenhauer refers to the Vedas and Upanishads). In death we are afraid of losing the body, which is will itself.
But the will is objectified through the pangs of birth and the bitterness of death, and this is a stable objectification. This is immortality in time: the intellect perishes in death, but the will is not subject to death. Schopenhauer thought so.
His universal pessimism was in sharp contrast to the mentality of Enlightenment philosophy and classical German philosophy. As for ordinary people, they are used to being guided by the formula of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus: “Death does not concern us at all: while we exist, there is no death, and when there is death, we do not exist.” But let's give Schopenhauer his due: he shows us the world not in one color, but rather in two colors, that is, more real and thus leads us to the idea of what is the highest value of life. Pleasure, luck, happiness in themselves, or everything that precedes them is also valuable for us? Or maybe this is life itself?
Schopenhauer initiated the process of affirming the volitional component in European philosophy as opposed to a purely rational approach that reduces a person to the position of a thinking tool. His ideas about the primacy of will were supported and developed by A. Bergson, W. James, D. Dewey, Fr. Nietzsche and others. They were the basis of the “philosophy of life”.
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
In the last third of the XIX century. in Germany and France, a trend was formed that received the general name "philosophy of life". It included the theories and ideas of such philosophers as W. Dilthey, A. Bergson, G. Simmel, Fr. Nietzsche and others. One of the researchers of the philosophy of life, G. Rickert, noted her desire not only to comprehensively consider life as a single entity, but also to make it the center of world description and attitude, and in philosophy - the key to all philosophical knowledge.
The manifestation of interest in life on the part of philosophers was an act of humanism, because in the conditions of exacerbation of social contradictions, life as a value was taken under protection, attention was drawn to it, and its fundamental character was emphasized. But the weaknesses of the philosophy of life were also obvious. This primarily concerned its very concept. The concept of "life" turned out to be ambiguous and indefinite; therefore the whole philosophy of life took on a discordant form. Accustomed to strict and rational forms, to exact knowledge and its practical usefulness, the consciousness of a European could hardly perceive the specific logic of the philosophy of life and its general aspiration “to nowhere”, the absence of a clear goal and direction.
Nevertheless, the philosophy of life left a noticeable mark on culture and philosophy. Western Europe and gave rise to ideas that were developed in the XX century.
Let us turn to the specific ideas of representatives of the philosophy of life.
One of them, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 - 1911), was a German cultural historian and philosopher. He was influenced both by German idealism and romanticism, and by the positivism fashionable in his time.
Dilthey proceeded from the thesis, which he adopted from the neo-Kantians, namely: what is natural - scientific knowledge opposed to cultural and historical knowledge. Hence the idea was expressed that there really are sciences about nature and sciences about the spirit.
The sciences of nature are based on rational knowledge and have the reliability of their conclusions. They rely on categories, apply procedures generally accepted in their field, and are aimed at finding the causes of phenomena and the laws of nature. Both causes and laws are universal. The sciences of the spirit are a completely different kind of knowledge. It has a fundamentally different basis. What is important here is not rational thinking, but intuitive comprehension of the essence, experiencing the events of history and current life, the involvement of the subject in the subject of knowledge. At the same time, the special value of such knowledge for the subject is emphasized. The very concept of “science” is in principle inapplicable to this kind of knowledge, i.e., in this case it has a conditional meaning.
However, Dilthey is still talking about the "sciences of the spirit." Why? The fact is that, in the spirit of the trends of his time, he sought to “pull up” the entire complex of humanitarian knowledge, and these are historical sciences, cultural sciences, psychology, etc., to the level of natural sciences in the sense that to identify the categorical apparatus of such knowledge and some general principles and approaches. In this case, they would have acquired a more rigorous form, a scientific form. Thus, it was about the development of the theoretical foundations of the "sciences about the spirit." But at the same time, the transfer of the categories of science to the sphere of the spirit was excluded.
In his work Sketches for a Critique of Historical Reason, Dilthey sought to overcome the speculative philosophical systems of I. Kant and especially Hegel, as well as the intellectualism of the Enlightenment. He proceeded from the fact that the humanities are based on life itself, which is expressed in a teleological (i.e., in its inherent purposeful cause) connection of experiences, understanding and interpretation of the expressions of this life.
Spiritual life arises on the soil of the physical world, it is included in evolution and is its highest step. The conditions under which it arises are analyzed by natural science, which reveals the laws that govern physical phenomena. Among the physical bodies of nature there is also the human body, and experience is most directly connected with it. But with it we are already moving from the physical world to the world of spiritual phenomena. And it is the subject of the sciences of the spirit, and their cognitive value does not depend at all on the study of physical conditions. Knowledge about the spiritual world arises from the interaction of experience, understanding of other people, historical comprehension of communities as subjects of historical action, and, finally, objective spirit. Experience is the fundamental premise of all this.
What actions are caused by it? Experience includes elementary acts of thinking (intellectuality of experience), this also includes judgments about the experienced, in which the experience is objective. From these simple acts, formal categories arise, such concepts as “unity”, “diversity”, “equality”, “differences”, “degree”, “relationship”, “impact”, “strength”, “value”, etc. They are properties of reality itself.
The general conclusion follows from the foregoing: the subject of cognition is one with its object, and this object is the same at all stages of objectification.
To comprehend the essence of life, Dilthey considered it important to see a common feature of it and the external objects that appear in it. This sign is nothing but time. This is revealed already in the expression "the course of life." Life is always flowing, and it cannot be otherwise. Temporality appears to be essential to the understanding of life.
Like I. Kant, Dilthey believed that time is given to us thanks to the unifying unity of our consciousness. The concept of time finds its ultimate realization in the experience of time. Here it is perceived as a continuous movement forward, in which the present ceaselessly becomes the past, and the future becomes the present. The present is a moment filled with reality, it is real as opposed to memory or ideas about the future, manifested in hope, fear, aspiration, desire, expectation. Here Dilthey reproduces the reasoning of the medieval theologian Augustine Aurelius about time.
This fullness of reality, or the present, is permanent, while the content of the experience is constantly changing. The ship of our life, as it were, is carried by the current, and the present is always and everywhere where we sail in its waves, suffering, remembering or hoping, that is, wherever we live in the fullness of our reality. We are constantly moving, involved in this current, and at the moment when the future becomes the present, the present is already immersed in the past. Looking back, we find ourselves bound (the past is unique and unchanging), looking forward, we are free and active, because the future is always an opportunity that we want to use.
As you can see, the idea of time in the sciences of the spirit is very different from the idea of time in the sciences of nature. This warns us against the temptation to resort to simplification: to transfer the categories of science to the realm of the spirit.
But it also carries a more radical meaning: being in the stream of life, we cannot comprehend its essence. What we take for essence is only its image, imprinted by our experience. The flow of time itself, in the strict sense, is not experienced. For when we wish to observe time, we destroy it by observation, because it is established by attention; observation stops the flowing, the becoming. Thus, we experience only a change in what has just been, and this change continues. But we do not experience the flow of life itself.
Another important characteristic of life, according to Dilthey, is its connectedness. In the historical world there is no natural-scientific causality, because such causality provides for the obligatory nature of well-defined consequences. History knows only the relations of action and suffering, action and reaction. The subjects of statements about the historical world, whether about the individual world or about the life of mankind, are characterized only by a certain way of communication within clearly limited limits. It is the connection between the individual and the general.
All components of life are connected into one whole. We master this whole through understanding. Dilthey demonstrates this idea by referring to the genre of philosophical autobiography, represented by three prominent names: Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe. All of them are characterized by the presence of their own meaning in every life. It lies in the meaning that gives each present moment (single), stored in memory, a value in itself; the meaning of memory is determined by the relation to the meaning of the whole (general). This meaning of individual being is completely unique and cannot be analyzed by any rational cognition. And yet, like Leibniz's monad, it reproduces the historical universe for us in a specific way. Thus, life appears before us in its integral connection.
These arguments of Dilthey formed the basis of hermeneutics, which was further developed already in the 20th century.
Now let's turn to the ideas of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), who devoted his numerous works to the philosophy of life.
Bergson draws our attention to the creative nature of the flow of life - it, like conscious activity, is continuous creativity. Creativity, as you know, is the creation of something new, unique. Therefore, to anticipate new form no one can live. Life has a fundamentally open character. Science, in the person of our intellect, rebels against this thought, for it operates with what is repetitive. That is why science (our intellect) cannot grasp the phenomenon of life. This is the task of philosophy, says Bergson. How can she do it?
In order to approach the principle of all life, it is not enough to rely on dialectics (the thesis of German classical philosophy), here one must rise to intuition. It is known that it is such a form of cognition that is abstracted from details and logical procedures and allows one to grasp the object being studied in its most general essential manifestations in an instant. The philosopher, however, abandons intuition, as soon as its impulse is communicated to him, he surrenders to the power of concepts. But soon he feels that the ground is lost, that a new contact with the intuition becomes necessary. Dialectics weakens intuition, but it - dialectics - ensures the internal agreement of our thought with itself. Intuition, if it lasted more than a few moments, would not only ensure the agreement of philosophers with their own thought, but also the agreement of all philosophers among themselves. For there is only one truth, and thus it would be attained.
What is life and why, according to Bergson, is it comprehended by intuition? Life is movement, materiality is the reverse movement; each of them is simple. The matter that forms the world is an indivisible stream; life is also indivisible, cutting through matter, carving living beings in it. Of these two streams, the second goes against the first, but the first still gets something from the second. From this, a modus vivendi (Latin way of existence) is established between them, which is the organization.
This organization takes on before our senses and our intellect the form of external parts in relation to each other in time and space. But we turn a blind eye to the unity of the impulse that, passing through the generations, unites individuals with individuals, species with species, and from the whole series of living beings creates one boundless wave that runs over matter.
Chance plays a significant role in the evolution of life itself. Random are the forms that arise in a creative impulse; accidental division of the initial trend into certain tendencies; accidental stops and retreats, as well as adaptations. But only two things are necessary: I. gradual accumulation of energy; 2. the elastic channeling of this energy in various and indefinable directions leading to free acts.
Life from its very origin is a continuation of one and the same impulse, divided along divergent lines of evolution. The whole of life, both animal and vegetable, in its essential part, seems like an effort aimed at accumulating energy and then letting it go through malleable but changeable channels, at the end of which it must perform infinitely varied works. This is what the impulse of life wanted to achieve, passing through matter. But his strength was limited. The impulse is finite and given once and for all. The movement he communicated meets obstacles; it condenses and separates.
The first great division was the division into two kingdoms - vegetable and animal, which complement each other, but are not, however, in agreement with each other. This split was followed by many others. Hence the diverging lines of evolution.
A. Bergson believes that the spiritual life cannot be separated from the rest of the world; there is a science that shows "solidarity" between conscious life and brain activity. An evolutionary theory that puts man outside the animal kingdom must not miss the facts of the origin of species through gradual transformation. By this, a person seems to return to the category of animals.
Only intuitive philosophy can comprehend life and spirit in their unity, but not science, although science is able to “sweep away” philosophy with its arguments, but at the same time it does not do anything. will explain. In order for philosophy to fulfill its task, it must deal not with this or that living being, but with life taken as a whole. All life, from the initial impulse that threw it into the world, will appear before philosophy as an ascending stream, which is counteracted by the downward movement of matter. At one point he passes freely, dragging with him an obstacle that will aggravate his path, but will not stop him. At this point, humanity is; here is our privileged position.
On the other hand, this ascending stream is consciousness, and, like any consciousness, it embraces countless possibilities that penetrate each other, to which, therefore, neither the category of unity nor the category of multiplicity, created for inert matter, fit. The stream passes, therefore, crossing human generations, subdividing into individuals. Thus souls are continuously created, which, however, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing but streams between which the great river of life is divided, flowing through the body of mankind.
Consciousness differs from the organism it animates, although it reflects certain changes taking place in the organism. Our brain marks the motor states of consciousness every moment. But this is where their mutual dependence ends. The fate of consciousness is not connected with the fate of brain matter. Consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself, but it cannot pass through matter without dwelling on it, without adapting itself to it.
This adaptation is what is called intelligence. The intellect will therefore always see matter in a special framework, for example, in the framework of necessity. But at the same time, he will neglect the share of the new or creative, associated with free action; always the intellect will replace the action itself with an artificial approximate imitation, obtained by combining the former with the former, like with like. Philosophy should absorb the intellect into intuition, then many of the difficulties of knowing life will, if not disappear, then weaken.
A. Bergson, as can be seen from the above, does not give a clear description, much less a traditional definition of life. But he describes it in its most essential manifestations and shows its complexity and the complexity of the process of comprehending it.
The German philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918) pointed to the same line of life. In his book Metaphysics of Life, he noted the contradictions that arise in our minds when we cognize the world and life. Always and everywhere we stumble upon boundaries, and we ourselves are them. But at the same time, we are aware of these limits. But to know about them is given only to those who stand outside them. There are reasons to believe that our spiritual life overcomes itself, going beyond the reasonable.
Isn't it logical to assume that the world is not decomposed into forms of our cognition, that we, at least in a purely problematic way, can think of such a given world that we cannot think. This must be seen as a breakthrough through the one-sidedness of any frontier. G. Simmel calls this an act of self-transcendence, which puts a boundary rooted within itself only. In this spirit for the first time reveals itself as "totally vital".
It is only this way of being that Zimkel calls life. Its philosophical problematic, according to Simmel, lies in the fact that life is both an unbounded continuity and a definitely limited Self. Here it is appropriate to recall Heraclitus (“Everything flows; one cannot enter the same river twice”), who said about the continuity of the flow of life, but singled out something stable in it, as a kind of border that always had to be crossed. That's how it goes general idea about life: Zarathustra (from Friedrich Nietzsche) says that it is that which always overcomes itself.
The boundaries discussed above can be considered as forms, as the ultimate world-forming principles. What is their attitude towards life?
Between life and the form of life, Simmel believes, there is a split that must be overcome. Reason calls this the overcoming of duality through unity: in itself it - this unity - is already something third. In a single act, it forms something that is already more than the most vital movement, that is, individual formation, and destroys it again, and this form, outlined by solid lines on the common surface of the stream, forces it to cross its borders and blur in the further flow. The main essence of life is not in the replacement of continuity by individuality, but in the homogeneous function of transcendence of life itself.
This is how we approach the acquisition of an absolute concept of life. Simmel sees two mutually complementary definitions of life: life as a movement towards greater life (more is life), and life as that which is more than life. Because we have life, we need form; and since life is always more than life, it needs more than form. Life is permeated with the contradiction that it can perish only in forms, and yet it can not perish in them, due to which it overcomes and destroys any of them, whichever it may be formed.
Perhaps the most paradoxical and at the same time famous representative of the philosophy of life was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). With his original works, among which the most famous are “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Antichrist”, etc., he created a reputation for himself as a thinker who made deep insights in those areas of philosophy and culture where everything seemed clear and established. He subjected to total criticism the traditional values of European culture and, above all, the Christian religion and rational thinking. Nietzsche clearly showed that all the wealth of the living world cannot be comprehended and mastered in existing system cultural values, and that life as such is far from being understood by us, and if it is understood, it is one-sided and wrong.
At the heart of Nietzsche's worldview is not the Bible (it rejects it) and not rational philosophy (he criticizes and ignores it), but a natural instinct, expressed in the desire of all living things for domination and power. Following A. Schopenhauer in evaluating the world will as the primary principle of being, Nietzsche modifies this principle into the will to power. From this followed the conclusion about the baselessness of the traditionally understood essence of things, for such is associated with causality. But we invented causality ourselves, while in the essence of things there is only will, strong or weak.
Life, according to Nietzsche, is determined by the law of subordination of the weak to the strong, and this is the extremely broad principle of being. Dominance manifests itself in economic, political, social, interpersonal and even intimate relationships; it is filled with the real content of human history. It is also observed in nature. It can be hidden, it can be opposed as a principle, but it cannot be crossed out. The Beggar sees in this the hypocrisy of Christian morality - she is the "great seductress" - and of all European culture.
The will to power as a principle splits society into slaves (weak) and masters (strong); hence the two moralities: the aristocratic and the morality of the crowd, the people, the masses. The latter is cultivated by Christianity and humanistic European culture and is therefore rejected by Nietzsche.
The will to power is seen by Nietzsche as a manifestation of the instinct of freedom. But to freedom, as well as to domination, war brings up. Nietzsche quotes Heraclitus, his "War is the father of everything." In war, male fighting qualities dominate and suppress all others - the instinct for happiness, peace, peace, compassion, etc. Peaceful life kills the will to power, makes a person a weak personality and turns him into a herd animal. In particular, such a concept as “conscience” makes a person a slave to the herd instinct, from the standpoint of Christian morality, moral means unselfish, but this, according to Nietzsche, is a prejudice. This also applies to such concepts as “good”, “true” - in the context of positivist philosophy, they mean “expedient”, “useful”, etc.
Nietzsche's measure of true value is freedom from the social norms of his contemporary society. So who is free? This is the one who is “beyond good and evil”, that is, outside the morality and laws of society. Nietzsche saw his hero in the image of a “blond beast”, that is, a person of Aryan origin, but not weighed down by conscience and moral doubts. He called Prince N. Machiavelli and Napoleon the historical prototypes of such a hero.
If the philosophers of the era of reason saw progress in the history of mankind, that is, the rise of society from lower, primitive forms of life to higher forms, then Nietzsche saw in history the weakening of the will to live and the degradation of the natural principle in man and among peoples. Therefore, he was an opponent of progress, opposed the ideas of socialism and various projects for the transformation of society. Progress, from his point of view, would be the education of a new ruling caste for Europe, consisting of smaller but stronger human specimens. They would have constituted a race of masters and conquerors, a race of Aryans.
Nietzsche's works bear the stamp of irrationalism and unconventionality. They are written in the form of parables, aphorisms, etc. and require considerable effort of imagination and will when reading. But Nietzsche himself said that they were not written for everyone.
Nietzsche was one of the most educated people of the 19th century, but due to his inherent genius, he himself placed himself outside society (you can read about his life in the book: Daniel Halevi. Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Riga. 1991). The role of Nietzsche in European history and culture is significant. His ideas were actively used in Nazi Germany to promote war and racism. Nor were they alien to the revolutionaries in Russia and other countries. This, however, is not the point; all this happened against the will of Nietzsche himself. The main thing is different: with his work, he warned against the inevitable, but ugly forms of development of Western civilization; he warned us about the coming alienation in the sphere of European culture, about its deep rebirth, about the massification and primitivization of spiritual life. Nietzsche is one of the forerunners of the philosophy of existentialism.
PHILOSOPHY OF PRAGMATISM
The idea of positivist philosophy about the experimental basis of reliable knowledge was used by pragmatism. This is a philosophy that has made pure experience not just the original principle of knowledge, but also given it an ontological status. W. James (James), American philosopher, (1842-1910), in "Does Consciousness Exist?" - rejected the “subject-object” relationship as the basic principle of philosophy and instead introduced the concept of “pure experience”, which he considered as “the primary substance or material that makes up everything in the world”. The relationship “subject-object” is in this case only a derivative of pure experience.
As for “pure experience”, this is the immediate life stream that provides material for our subsequent reflection. At the same time, W. James abolishes the difference between spirit and matter: on this basis, “neutral monism” arises, according to which the substance of which the world consists is neither spirit nor matter, but something that precedes both; “experience” and “the substance of the world” never coincide in time and space.
In pragmatism, the practical side of philosophy is strongly emphasized, or rather the idea of the relationship between theoretical reflections and their practical implementation (by the way, the word pragma, which underlies the name “pragmatism”, is translated from Latin as deed, action). We are often, James believes, forced to make decisions without sufficient theoretical grounds. In these cases, we are guided only by faith (or unbelief). Hence the desire of pragmatists to consider not so much knowledge as faith as the basis of our actions. (W. James “... Believe, and you will be right...”).
What is clear is that such premises testify to the strengthening of subjectivity in cognition. Let us turn to the statements of the American philosopher C. Pierce (1839 - 1914), who formulated the principle of pragmatism: in order to achieve clarity in our thoughts about any object, we need to find out what possible consequences of a practical nature this object may contain. Here we see the substitution of the epistemological moment for the evaluative one, which is in conflict with the canons of both science (natural science) and rationalistic philosophy, which affirm the objectivity of true knowledge.
