The essence of man in terms of European philosophy

The emergence of Christianity turned the philosophical interpretation of the problem of man - instead of being one of the elements of the universe, as it was for antiquity, he began to occupy a specific place given to him by God himself. On the one hand, he was created by God for a special mission, on the other, he separated from him because of the fall. Thus, the theological thought of the first centuries of our era represents the essence of man in a dualistic manner, split. The Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages was dominated by the doctrine that the divine and human nature coincide in the image of Christ. Christ has become a man, without ceasing to be God, and at the same time, every person, by virtue of associating with grace, is approaching Christ.

This unique place in the Cosmos, between the vale of sorrow and God, became for the thinkers of the Renaissance the "microcosm", which they believed was directly related to the macrocosm (and this was the same as pantheism and Christian mysticism). Believing that no one and nothing can compare with a man, and Nikolai Kuzansky, Paracelsus, and Boehme declared that "the macrocosm and the microcosm are one thing." However, the new European rationalism put the question of what is the essence of man in a different way. Since the time of Descartes, the ability to think has become the cornerstone of this definition, because rationalism sees all the specifics of being of people precisely in the mind. If Descartes saw in this connection in the connection between the physical and spiritual components a psychophysical paralellism, Leibniz believed them inseparable. The Age of Enlightenment, thanks to Lametrie, gave us such an aphorism as the "man-machine", because the French philosopher believed that the soul is identical with a consciousness reacting to external and internal stimuli.

In the XVIII century the problem of "what is the essence of man, what is it", has become one of the main philosophical issues. For example, Kant proceeds from a dualistic understanding of rational being, which refers to different "universes" - a natural necessity and a moral one. He calls physiology everything that nature does from man, and pragmatics is what this intelligent being does or is capable of making of itself. However, other representatives of the classical philosophy of Germany took the example of the Renaissance (for example, Herder, Goethe, advocates of the "natural philosophy of romanticism"). Herder said that man is the first freedman of nature, because his feelings are not as regulated as animals, and are capable of creating culture, and Novalis even called history an applied anthropology.

In Hegel's philosophy, the Spirit comes out of nature from the moment of the emergence of a rational being. The essence of man according to Hegel consists in self-understanding of the Absolute Idea. At first she realizes herself as subjective (anthropology, phenomenology, psychology); Then - as an objective (law, morality, state); And, finally, as an absolute Spirit (art, religion and philosophy). With the creation of the latter, the history of the development of Idea is completed, and the spirit, as it were, returns to itself, according to the law of negation of negation. In general, the German philosophy of this period believes that people are the subjects of spiritual activity that creates the world of culture, carriers of a common ideal and reasonable beginning.

Already Feuerbach, criticizing Hegel, understands man as a sensual-corporeal being. Marxism also approaches the explanation of the natural and social in homo sapiens based on the principle of dialectical-materialistic monism, seeing in it the product and subject of social and labor activity. The main thing is the social essence of man, because it represents the totality of all social relations, Marx said. The nineteenth century enriched anthropology with irrational concepts that brought to the forefront the essences and forces that lay beyond thought (feelings, will, etc.). Priority in this area Nietzsche considers the game of vitality and emotion, and not consciousness and reason. Kirkjegor sees the most basic in the act of will, where, in fact, the birth of man takes place, and thanks to which the natural being becomes a spiritual being.

The biosocial essence of man is seen not as a popular idea for the twentieth century, because thinkers of the modern era are primarily concerned with the problem of the individual, in connection with which many directions of the philosophy of our time are called personalistic. According to them, human being can not be reduced to any fundamental basis. By rejecting both social and mechanistic approaches, existentialism and personalism divorce the concepts of individuality (as a part of nature and the social whole) and personality (unique spiritual self-determination) in different directions. Ideas of the "philosophy of life" (Dilthey) and phenomenology (Husserl) formed the basis of philosophical anthropology as a separate current (Scheler, Plesner, Gehlen, "culturanthropology of Rothhacker, etc.). Although for representatives of Freudianism and related schools, the naturalistic approach remains characteristic.